the *sinking* of the Bismarck???

Oh it’s okay, we’re burning a bajillion dollars building obsolete ships *abundantly*

Generally, any theory of the world that extends unearned privilege to those espousing it, while demanding more of others, can be safely dismissed as self-serving bullshit.

Y’all might not appreciate it, but it took him 87 moves and 14 hours to get here

Some (disappointed) Nigerian media suggesting this Tomahawk strike didn’t hit much at all. The Biden admin used to take flak for doing tit-for-tat symbolic strikes against empty Iranian proxy facilities in Syria. Seems like this admin may be doing a bit of that with ISIS in Nigeria and Syria.

I remember the phrase "they can't be allowed to melt back into society" re: the de-Baathification of Iraq after the war there. Like everything about that experience, the attempt was cynical, stupid, and botched. But there really should be a plan about what we do with guys like these in the future.

The folly of the abundance bro pundits is that they think if Democrats were just a bit more performatively cruel they could bring the American volk on their side for their urbanist dreams. That will never happen. Regardless of the merits of abundance as raw policy.

NORAD Santa tracker is Woke

Yeah you know what gets my testosterone going: losing a war because we built for ego and not force design.

Don’t worry, no one screeching “Let’s Build” on LinkedIn’s VetBro DefenseTech circles is asking either. If the sailors die, they were woke, anyway. If the sailors survive, they became masculine in January 2025. If Taiwan falls, they lacked purity of essence. It’s simple, you see.

The people pumping “Battleships” right now are the dumbest defense commentators in existence. They’re free of insight, purged of virtue, desperately seeking a fascist’s RT that will land them a hit on NewsNation. Ignore it. Also, weep for our country. We have torpedos bursting at the waterline.

You can convince 20% of people of just about anything. So when you hit that mark, you can assume that anyone with brain cells in the country disapproves.

funny how that works

if bari weiss had tried to do 9/11 there'd be three towers now

30 years ago today SUDDEN DEATH was released in theaters. It quickly became my favorite film from Van Damme as well as director Peter Hyams and it’s “Die Hard at a Hockey Game” hook is one of the most underrated variations of the John McClane blueprint.

Oh a self-important king drew cool plans for a gilded, cannoned-up fantasy ship? Cant wait for it to sail several hundred meters in a mild wind, over a bed of anaerobic silt.

here's a hot for Bluesky take: a lot of tech-criticism is so bad and focused on a kind of stupid imagined STEM-humanities culture war that some companies have been able to build whole brands around being "evil tech bros 😈" making supervillain promises despite their shit being vaporware

DOJ briefly uploaded this letter from Jeff Epstein to serial child molester Larry Nassar: "Our president shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to 'grab snatch,' whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system."

this made me so happy

the human shadow makes this one actually interesting if you don’t consider that it’s evidence from heinous crimes with an innocent person redacted. it’s actually interesting.

...and my piece about how the Cybertruck was a good prediction of where America was heading, which I think stood up really well after a year of this bullshit. anyway that's it, haven't done much other writing of note, sadly www.motor1.com/features/746...

The only other pieces I was super proud of were my explainer on why you should sell your Tesla (which I stand by, even if most Americans are seemingly fine with driving cars built by guy who likes to sieg-heil) insideevs.com/features/755...

I wrote much less this year than I've written in the past five, so there's not a whole lot to revisit. This piece, though, I still think is probably the best article I've ever written, even if it was a dumb professional move to write it [free to read] www.patreon.com/posts/empero...

Well I’ll give Bari Weiss this: she figured out how to get millions of people to watch 60 Minutes on a Monday

Brushing up on theory

"Get the principals on camera" is such a telling phrase here, because it tells us that for Weiss there's no world in which the victims of these horrific actions can actually be seen as the subjects of the story: They're background noise, and the people who matter are the ones sending them.

WATCH: Here's the segment CBS News pulled from "60 Minutes" last night

theyre just all so far in over their heads, its astounding

Ask and you shall receive

37. I will concede. Night is real. Some days I can't fly a kite. It is also true that sometimes coal trains are stuck, gas pipelines fail, warm weather derates thermal power plants and unplanned outages happen.

36. Finally this. The mark of the fossil fuel shill who never loses the arrogance to walk into a room, say "the sun doesn't shine at night and its not always windy", drop the mic and leave, confident that no one else knows what they just discovered.

genuinely funny combination

nothing i can say about these people is crueler than their behavior toward each other

Half-formed idea but Heated Rivalry (and RWRB before it) strike me as proof people are nostalgic for the days when even photogenic gay guys were considered transgressive

"He is the most consistently unpopular president since the advent of polling. He has never had the support of a majority of Americans, not in any of his three presidential elections and not for a single day of either term in Gallup surveys" www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/u...

This Yglesias piece in the NYT is horrifically bad. Almost every "fact" it cites is provably false. At best it is cocktail party banter from a pundit who knows nothing of energy. At worst, it was cut/paste from oil industry talking points. So, a rebuttal: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...

Zohran Mamdani scares the ADL more than these guys and I think it's fair to ask why

Genuinely unfathomable the level of praise the governor of Rhode island heaped upon this "investigation" which appears to have been two days behind the perpetrator

I think a lot about how New Dealers plastered plaques on everything they built and hired Woody Guthrie to tour the Pacific Northwest writing propaganda songs about power dams. those guys knew ball

Warner easily the most below-replacement democratic Senator, right? Fetterman a disaster obviously and there's other issues with leadership but at rank and file Warner is voting like Blue Virginia is a fluke and not a durable fact.

there is, of course, a connection between architectural taste and ideology. i am criticizing her belief, expressed here and elsewhere, that ideology is wholly constituted of architectural taste, and that fascism is preferable to liberalism on those grounds. (there could not be other grounds.)

"[M]onetized the dysfunction" is a good way to describe the American health care system too.

"Thank you to my friend, Jóska Pálnik, who in 1960, on the second step of the water slide pool, told me how babies are born, and I wanted to die under the weight of this discovery." — László Krasznahorkai, in preface to 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech 🙏🏼🌍🕊️

By my count, Cristal Caballero would be the 14th Operation Midway Blitz defendant to have criminal charges dropped, with 17 defendants remaining. No convictions so far.

Cuellar has voted with the Republicans on everything and it is an absolute embarrassment to the Democratic Party that they restored him to his leadership role

Sincerely one of the funniest things the WSJ has ever written or done. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...