[going to double that one up in case you have trouble with the clip served via bluesky…led by donkeys are a bunch who’d take out a DC billboard for a blown up image of the birthday message to dead-jeff on the anniversary or whatever…they might be funnier than the guy that plays binface…& also in greater earnest?]
…well
There's way too many people, including a lot of anti-Platner types, who are revealing themselves to just be campists by attempting to pass the buck to a faction they don't like and it makes you look like enormous fucking clowns
He was FORCED to rape her, you see. He had no choice!
what a surprise.
again, he reacted like this when the Nazi tattoo was revealed! he wasn’t contrite, there was no actual acceptance or suggestion of change, it was pure entitlement and anger. All of this should have been obvious.
…& that’s
I find one thing about Trump especially frustrating as a former prosecutor: his willingness to use delay as a litigation strategy. Tonight, the courts moved quickly in the E. Jean Carroll case, which means time is just about up. Read about it here: open.substack.com/pub/joycevan…
Burnham: “We will also focus on reducing foreign dependency, securing inward investment and building new industrial partnerships with allies. Reindustrialisation through defence — and other sectors — is critical for both our economic and national security…”
…binface isn’t technically a member of the monster raving loony party…that lot have been trying to lower the tone for so long screaming lord such may no longer be with us…& given that there is a deposit you have to pay to stand that I don’t think either any of that lot or the binface character have ever won enough votes to get back…it’s not as cheap a gag as it looks…so…I don’t know if anyone would quite know what to do next if he won…but he might make the deposit back this time & that alone would be pretty nuts…not exactly likely…even as the only not-nigel option…that’s after all why nige deigned to run in the seat after years of either being paid by the european parliament to take advantage of the low turnout for those elections to play fox-in-henhouse games & still take the generous pension…or…hold no office but be the acknowledged power in the bitch-about-it wing of the tories-aren’t-nasty-enough party likewise acknowledged to steer the national overton window
absolutely spot on re Nigel Farage’s speech – from Tom Peck
“Farage Whinges About a 'Media Pile-On'. The Truth Is, the Media Made Farage”At every stage of his political career, the Reform UK leader has been helped on his way by the media machine he now affects to despise. And he is still manipulating them with ease.
…would have been denying him the resignation until such time as the investigation into the “we thought it might be money laundering so we reported it like a responsible bank” financial affairs he should have at least declared if he was going to play by parliament rules…got around to ruling…they…don’t seem to have done that
From the Guardian. The last line is gold. Farage is going to hate all the derision and ridicule heading his way.“In a post on social media, Reeves says:‘I will accept Nigel Farage’s request to be appointed Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead.It […] [Original post on mastodon.social]
…is it really different from spending it arguing in the sewer the whole sorry lot are stewing in…who can say…will it finally rid the body politic of its parasitic infestations…almost certainly not…is it thin gruel…maybe…does it look like a bad time for people who deserve that enough that there’s a massive appetite for it…yo…churchill…do the thing
[…if I had more time or just generally better diligence he’d go “yes, yes, yes…” it’s…a thing…don’t see many these days but there were people who put figurines on the parcel shelf with nodding heads…before the ads…&…the insurance lot were already called churchill so car insurance…bulldog…says no & then yes, yes, yes…meerkats hadn’t been invented or whatever…& nobody really got over taking away the beer & tobacco ads that were always by far the funniest…we don’t have time to get into it…umm…lucky for everyone, that?]
“.. the appeals court said in its ruling that the center had ‘failed to support this assertion with any specific facts or evidence.’”@variety.com variety.com/2026/music/n…
brain poisoned, gutter misogyny. 1) that there is (thankfully) no norm for releasing the play-by-play of personal messages in cases like this and 2) the detail about being explicitly told not to come over and coming over anyway does not in any way complicate this story
The thing I'm maddest about re:Platner are all the people who never served in the military who told me that it was perfectly normal for enlisted military people to get Nazi tattoos.NO IT FUCKING ISN'T.
Elem Klimov's horrifying masterpiece COME AND SEE is an "unshakeably damning" look into the dehumanising horrors of war. It is perhaps the most visceral, impossible-to-forget anti-war work ever made. Catch it returning to the PCC next Wednesday 15th July at 8:30pm. 🎟️: buff.ly/LrBvb5l
It’s not excessively gory, but incredibly disturbing if that makes sense.
…random “fun” fact…the prince charles cinema might be low-key something of an institution…one of the cheapest tickets in town but tucked off the edge of leicester square right in the west end…did the “repertory” thing…while all the expensive ones around the square ran the same four or five things many times a day across a ton of screens the prince charles has one screen & runs several different films each day on a schedule that has them show up more than once but mostly not regularly…might have had a regular slot for a sing-a-long rocky horror picture show before the secret cinema lot even got started down the road to immersive mass cosplay cinema-as-event…& nowadays it’s not nearly as cheap…£10-£15 a ticket…the Vue one might be cheaper now which sort of makes me feel like I don’t know london at all it’s so weird as a concept…but back around when less than £2 could give an under-16 kid the run of the full zones 1-6 of london transport for 24hrs…& consequently thought ken livingstone was a pretty neat guy…less than £5 to take yourselves to either see something again or go see some thing you randomly happen to know is good…or just swing by & see if there’s anything good on today…was around a 60-75% discount on the going rate in the immediate vicinity…so…about the same as you got with a student discount most places “up north”…but…not the “pay theatre prices to take the kids to the movies” in one of the ones that does premieres like the one the other day for *that* odyssey…don’t get me started…really…if you don’t believe me ask @myopicprophet or @megmegmcgee…IYKYK…anyway…the prince charles…as was/is…it’s not the the ICA right on the strip you can see from buck house…or the BFI away the other side of the river on the southbank…where very serious people can go & very seriously watch sometimes-not-very-serious-at-all movies if you can figure out when they have an appealing season on & can contort your schedule to take any of it in…I know…seems like a pointless random digression…why don’t I just keep that shit to myself…how hard can it really be to wrap your head around the simple expedient of giving the audience what it wants?
Absolutely this. The administrative-industrial complex’s focus on assessment and deliverables, about what can be measured in teaching efficacy, about “putting butts in seats” to earn a return on the investment in faculty has destroyed our ability to just… teach interesting shit.
And I think capitalism has largely crushed that. I feel like I was at the tail end of go-to-a-non-Ivy-to-just-get-a-well-rounded-general-education. The sort of thing that was once the province of elites and was now pretty available to the middle class, with relatively low stakes.
As an example, most folks don’t know that courses often have to fit general education learning objectives set by the state. Insofar as this is the case, there is pressure to fit as many, or the most popular, GE objectives into a course to ensure that the course runs with enough students.
Insofar as this is the case, we have to craft our syllabi to meet these objectives, especially when the course is first offered, so that the course runs and continues to run. As a result, the GE categories become flooded and competition among departments for space in them becomes intense.
Especially in the REQUIRED GEs for freshmen and incoming students. Across four institutions, I have heard some of the wildest justifications for course GE classifications and, when pushed, many of them boil down to “we need the GE to ensure the course runs.” Literally capitalism.
Now, I’m not mad at GEs: they’re a good way to ensure that students who’ve been indoctrinated into “college is for jobs,” or “we don’t need the humanities for non-majors,” to get access to things that they otherwise wouldn’t if they didn’t take courses outside their majors.
In fact, many STEM/Humanities double majors happen as a result of having to take a GE course in the humanities that sparked their interest. So I’m not opposed to GE categories: I’m opposed to the structure of capitalism that forces departments to compete over course space.
Also, fuck the Ivies. Were I God Emperor, I would seize the Ivies, force them to be public institutions, and turn all their historical shit into museums that all can have access to.
I’d also ensure funding parity between public university systems and institutions within the systems.
…the quoted post at the top actually comes from most of the way down someone else’s thread…that…points to a third
Thread worth reading.
I think there’s something to unpack here about how the semi-democratization of a college education also meant that capitalism wrecked it, because an actually educated, critically thinking populace is a threat to it.
Here are two stories worth reading together. In the first one, a Brown University professor found that most of his students used AI on a take-home exam. This is a story about AI use that fits the framework of academic honesty we had before AI: students just…cheated. But worth reading along with/1
…anyway…to take one out of the next thread down, so to speak
A college education when college education is something primarily aimed at elites who don’t really need it to make ends meet looks different from college education when it’s more or less a requirement to enter the work force (i.e. trade school that won’t admit it’s a trade school).
…in a different phrasing this is a complaint I heard for a long time from someone who themselves had gone the apprenticeship route in an engineering sort of sense before going on to make their living in an altogether different industry…who hated the switch that blended polytechnics with universities at the nominal & statistical level so tony’s labour could boast that over 50% of kids went to university…because they felt that de-valued both by pretending there wasn’t a difference between vocational training & extended study of a specific discipline…& that you didn’t always want one as much as the other when it came to being able to see an entry on a CV & know whether it implied the skillset you were hiring for…& I get how to a great many people that might sound like that person is somewhat of an elitist but I happen to know them well enough to know that if they are it wouldn’t be in the sense people generally mean that…somewhere between pragmatism, excessive application of rationality & faith-like attachment to the concept of merit as it overlaps with people being good at what they do providing they get the chance to learn what that looks like before it’s all on them…though…if you don’t know them…elitist is way easier to say without slowing down your train of thought
If the reason you send your kids off to college is so that they’ll be better conversationalists at cocktail parties and won’t embarrass the family but not catching a Shakespeare reference, that’s a different type of education from sending them there to become engineers who can get jobs.
…in your books that became merchant ivory films with helena bonham carter in…this is very much a thing…it’s why you do the then-equivalent to the gap year…the grand tour…to match your classical education…if you’re lucky you do it bertie wooster style floating on an independent income…but…bertie is a considerably more charming character than most kids you could reasonably call a trustafarian….either way…when grammar schools & student grants were still the order of the day it was still a system in which people with interest &/or talent in things could continue to pursue those according to rules closer to being a kid than a full-ticket-price adult for a few years after they got to be old enough to really appreciate how good a deal that was…whether or not it’s the same value when it requires you to carry a mortgage on the non-tangible asset you come away with these days…in the UK it’s still cheaper by a good bit than it is in the US
Like, college-as-polish-for-elites is still subject to market forces, but not as brutally as college-as-get-you-a-job-box-checking.
…so…I’m not saying I think the thread is off-track…or that it’s bang on, I suppose…the distinction being drawn is real…possibly being shorted on the variables-that-count count…fairly understandably but conceivably not altogether fairly in its own right…we’re all just human, after all…speaking of which
And I want to be clear that I’m not saying that college-as-elite-polish was necessarily a wholly good thing. I know enough self-aware Harvard grads to believe that its main function is/was to ensure a sense of distance between the elites and the commoners.
But at the end of the day, “we pay for you to go there largely because Tradition” gives educators some leeway to just… teach in a way that “89% of our graduates get a job in this field within 1 year of graduating” doesn’t.
The latter is almost inevitably going to push educators to teach to the test, and students to focus on scores in a way that fuels desperation and incentivizes cheating.
I have a lot of friends who are currently back in school or recently got degrees as adults and what struck me is how joyless the whole endeavor seems. They’re taking classes on subjects that actually interest them, but the experience of taking the class seems miserable.
…school isn’t a thing you can make be easy for everyone if it’s going to teach them all the stuff it’s going to help them & everyone if they know by the time they maybe decide they’ve had enough learning for one lifetime…but…it will never cease to disappoint me the extent to which we are more at ease with agreeing about how something sucks than leading with why it doesn’t have to & then demonstrating that part…the benefits of an expensive education are not intrinsically only to be found in the old boys’ nepotism network node creation…much of it has in fact held its place by virtue of being inherently useful stuff to have been taught…sometimes…though very much not in any guaranteed sense…lucratively so…but…there are other forms of enrichment available in life that know they aren’t taking the piss about looking at things in ways that mean that in absolutely deadpan ways…& I say that as someone who pretty much fucking loathed the experience of attending several schools in a row that you probably wouldn’t have heard of but in most ways aren’t any more different from the ones you have than other universities are to oxford & cambridge…some colleges of which are wealthier institutions than many a fine aristocratic lineage that can trace its bloodline & holdings back to 1066 or whatever
At one point in his remarks, the 80-year-old president claimed that a U.S. warship was attacked by the “the Islamic Republic of Japan.”theintercept.com/2026/07/08/t…
Back in May, a fed'l judge issued an extensive decision in SDNY declaring the DOGE-related mass-cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities grants to have been illegal and unconstitutional. On Monday, the final day to appeal, DOJ filed its notice of appeal to the Second Circuit.
@nkorpett.bsky.social, @mollyroberts.bsky.social, and Loren Voss on the Insurrection Act, National Guard authorities, and the "protective power" theory—tools a president could invoke to put troops at polling places despite the statutory wall laid out in Part I. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-…
…more people should be able to see how fucked up a bunch of stuff is than we’re given to understand appear to…but…some of it…genuinely…is…complicated
The $BE short report is extremely good (despite being obviously drafted by Claude) but it makes you wonder how longs pumped this to $75 billion given it takes five minutes of due diligence to notice that they require 100% of world scandium production to hit their numbers and 90% of that is in China.
…find someone who knows eye-glazing amounts of stuff about the parts you find all the way at the opposite end of the chain that supplies you with…just about anything & everything you think of as “tech”…& some other stuff you maybe wouldn’t even…& when they wake you up to tell you you got to the end where the “inputs” are…you’re going to be surprised how much of that is matter of this or that gas…you may not be as surprised to find that for a bunch of those…china is in a similar sort of position as with the rare earth mineral sort…not sure about you…but I myself did happen to be surprised to discover that in rough & ready terms…at your bleeding edge…the “AI” dev/engineering cream of the crop…in the US…is…40-45% US types…&…40-45% chinese nationals…with the rest of the place supplying the 10% remainder
I love video games, I have played video games my whole life, I went into programming in part because I was interested in making video gamesand instead I decided to work in industry and it ended up being the smartest decision I ever made and that absolutely breaks my heart
over and over I see talented people I deeply admire laid off and cast aside for reasons entirely beyond their control when all they want to do is make great games and it just shouldn’t have to be this way
it’s so tragic because it’s not like they are being laid off due to failed games. the studios are making money. the product sells, profits accrue. i’d understand if they were working hard on something that lost money, that’s tragic in its own way, but this isn’t that
…&…why is microsoft pulling this shit? …clearly they haven’t been good enough to let me know…but…if you’d wildly overextended yourself into a precipitous fiscal position you might do some misbegotten shit to try to make your books look less like you fucked those…so…fuck those people that were making the fun stuff…it’s business first, baby…that’s how you spell MBA, bitches
The cherry on the sundae is that she's a policy wonk for Heritage, so getting this sort of coverage is part of her job, but it also speaks to how the NYT's culture pieces are basically, 'journalist interviews their friend in the same elite circles.'
It’s pure silliness. It’s a path to an influencing career.
It’s basically the plot of a recent book!
Also in each case the framing on her personal life is whacky, given that – again – she's a policy wonk and has two-going-on-three kids, which is not exactly an unusual number.It's not hard to find women with three children, they're much more common than Heritage policy hacks!
😳 “Pax Romana. Pax Britannica. Pax Americana. Each marked an era in which a dominant power underwrote order thru control of the systems on which prosperity depended.” This is the context for “Pax Silica,” a new global initiative launched by Trump official Jacob Helberg, a *Palantir* alum. 3/30/26 1/
beef actually used to be a cheaper meat staple (in relative terms) and was only eclipsed by chicken due to factory farming much later in the centuryspectrum.ieee.org/how-chicken-…
…guess how you build circuits in silicone…hint…doping plays a big part
Quite something when the FT is publishing this kind of article about Palantir giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/… have Karp and Co actually finally crossed the imaginary line (I mean, I doubt it, but live in hope)
…anyway…this was due up 10mins ago & I haven’t fetched this week’s “I know, I’m sorry – here’s josh” instalment…but…if you need something to remind you why some people bother with some stuff…maybe click through on this one & stay for the end?
Thread (it's a long one but worth reading). The part that especially resonated with me was Javier having no "Plan B." Brother, very much hard same. I knew from an early age I wanted to write and I didn't have any sort of back-up plan if the writing thing didn't pan out. I was 100% all in on this.
…may or may not have time later for all the stuff I already feel like I probably ought to have found a spot for if the above made that cut…but…lest there otherwise be whatever our version of a weirdly discrete riot would look like on a schoolnight…ladies & gentlemen…josh johnson
[* – …if you’re wondering about that from all the way back at the beginning…& at any point betwixt hither & yon the words “hath its privilege(s)” crossed your mind…congrats…you scored the extra credit…which…in the terminology of tharg…is perhaps less a no-price than some nominal value of thrillpower…which…from sir alec’s “certain point of view”…is even cheaper at the point of production]
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So let me understand this. Trump has opened 25 gas stations that sell gas at a relatively minor discount (gas here $3.79, so $3.47 is an 8.44% discount) (admittedly this is before the orange imbecile started fighting with Iran again).
The current population of the US is 343 million people.
What, precisely, is an 8.44% discount at an incredibly tiny number of locations supposed to accomplish?
*Maybe* you could pump it up on social media, but the overwhelming majority of the US can’t get to these locations, and they’ll figure that out in … couple of minutes tops? So you’re actually just calling attention to the fact that you’ve fucked up gas prices and you’re handing gas discounts to a tiny group of people.
What’s the plan here?
I know, I should know by now there is no plan, and this is an utterly desperate stupid gambit. It’s so abysmally stupid that I think Trump himself had to come up with it.
Even better is that if the government is involved in funding this — and I’m 100% sure it is in at least an indirect fashion — then Trump is nationalizing oil reserves … y’know, communism.
The White House's "Freedom Fuel" gas station was quietly a Sunoco until they rebranded it for a July 3 photo op. Street View shows the same station selling gas for $2.99 in November 2024 — before Trump took office. Now the White House is calling $3.47 a win.
…if you told me he skipped the open market to tap the national strategic reserve to minimise the loss at the pump & was trying to pump it like a franchise model in a state-backed version of what’s the no-bueno part of the discount stuff that keeps those shadow fleets afloat full of embargoed oil that…by a bizarre co-incidence…may depend less on the passage at hormuz than some other stuff those bypass
…all of which being in service to tailoring content for a vitally-curated lensing effect via broadly specific locked-in vectors with proven triangulation…which a similarly broad definition would allow to be catch-all-ed as “social media”…but could possibly be construed as the unregulated territory of the available informational ecosystem that respects borders little more than it famously does just about anything
…it seems like it couldn’t be that because that would be unforgivably stupid at a level so egregious you’d think there would actually be some sort of globally agreed upon time out while some overhauling happened & we fixed some dials & gauges & slowly brought things back up to pressure until all the flywheels kicked back in & we had some functioning mechanisms of state in more states than not within & without the ones that make the USA when they’re playing away
…but the terrifying part for a while now does seem to have been that…it very much can be that sort of stupid & the consensus is “yup – wonder what it looks like tomorrow – let’s let it ride for today & see where it goes…” with mostly not so much as an appeal to the simpsons bit about “we’ve tried doing nothing & we’re all out of ideas”
…monkey smart…monkey know what time it is…ain’t no business like monkey-business?
…wait…no…that one’s for @farscythe …old ravers never die or whatever…respect to the aged dutchmen in an EDM world…I meant the other monkey business…in the key of classic?
…unless you prefer “the bear scenario”
…but…trying real hard not to wind up with posts longer than ed zitron’s that quote a bunch of his as it is so even that close to trying to set up in the bear corner is playing with fire & I gotta keep an appointment even though I haven’t been appointed to anything I’m aware of lately…so…you know…life ain’t fair…film at 11…if you haven’t picked one before then?
He’s definitely depleting the oil reserves. That’s been documented. I have to assume that part of the “plan” is that Trump is pocketing the money from sales. The full amount, not just taxes. Though I’d bet big that he’s stealing those, too.
…he took it upon himself to “hold” the venezuelan “assets” & generally at this point treats the federal accounts like extension of his criminal enterprise with a supreme court carte blanche…so…really…what isn’t on the table if you’ve ever heard of it in a banana(s) republic somewhere at one time or another?
We already know he takes “stakes” in companies when he doles out federal funding which is also socialism/communism!
But it’s so hilarious to hear him invoking the grim specter of the Iron Curtain shrouding America on Fourth of July and at the same time he’s doing central planned economy shit. He’s nationalizing the socialism! (Yeah, that’s right.)
Meanwhile, Mamdani is like “We should open some grocery stores in places there aren’t any” and half the national punditry required their fainting couches before rising to shriek incoherently about it for months. Because that’s socialism, you see, using public monies like that!
Have you ever seen Monarch of the Glen? I’m bingeing it now. It’s very soothing to me, but I have no connection to Scotland so I can’t get distracted by how implausible all this must be.
…I have seen an episode or two & I haven’t knowingly a bone to pick with it…but…I had a grandmother who sneered at liam neeson’s rob roy because she saw the ad with him in a kilt & “that’s not a real tartan much less a macgregor tartan”…so…fair bit of leeway developed there, perhaps?
It’s sort of weirdly … Admirable? Remarkable? … that there is no grift that’s too minor and no amount of stolen money that Trump won’t go for it. He’s the guy that grabs all the toiletries from every hotel room and steals all the condiments off the restaurant table.
Yeah, it’s one of the few things he’s both quite skilled at and single-minded about. You’ll never see him do the “one last score” thing; the action is the juice!
Silver lining to the Platner mess: Apparently Concerned Collins had cued up all kinds of opposition research on Platner, which now she can’t use. And without a named target, she can’t start oppo on his replacement. At this point, if Democrats can field a non-Nazi non-alleged rapist, Collins is in deep shit.
…the UK could probably spare you binface if you give it a minute
…pretty sure there’s someone running on the west coast for a seat in…wanna say congress not senate but maybe it’s governor or a state-level thing…some seat…who also only really has failed bids to be a UK MP to point to on their resumé so it’s barely a stretch if you really want to commit to the bit
…beggars belief you can’t scrape up someone who actually believes in some things people would vote for that isn’t an asshole with all of maine to pull from…maybe if they let other-than-white-south-africans inwardly migrate “the right way” that wouldn’t be so hard to get over a bar where collins leaves that?
…at least he’s up front that he’s so committed to the bit he wouldn’t be holding office in the sense he might under his government name
…who knows…he might even listen to people that knew stuff about which way to vote in accordance with the interests of the state &/or nation…which…might be an even bigger novelty act in maine than the costume-clown routine?
I read something interesting about Platner though: he got 70% of the Democratic primary vote, the largest such number of votes in Maine history. Certainly people up there must have known about his red flags, even if the national media glossed over them. Though there was a cult of personality going on there, maybe a large part of the appeal was the message, not the man? And meanwhile Schumer and the rest are desperately casting about to find a corpratist neo-Janet Mills because that’s what the people of Maine really need, if only they could stop deluding themselves and listen to people who know better.
It’s so hard to say what voters do and don’t know, lol. I don’t think the national media glossed over his issues, necessarily? Especially because he was tacitly more left than Dems are usually allowed to advocate for? But it’s always so hard to parse what voters actually liked when it comes to message vs. the messenger and also what it was up against (post-Biden Dems running someone in their late 70s, absolute buffoonery). I do think someone taking up that banner and running in that direction is a good idea, but who the hell knows, everyone’s already blaming every other faction they don’t like and it’ll probably fall to someone doomed from the jump.
…he might be like poochy…used to be buckethead…but someone had a rights issue about that…& lo the alien hordes did delivereth unto earth count binface of the not-from-around-here binfaces…& he’s stood against all sorts from may to…not december…but…the floppy haired clown, maybe…rishi for sure…handful of others…pretty much pay £500 to get to photobomb the clip for the count they have to be present for & make it hard to take whoever seriously, I suppose…which if you squint right might qualify as a fine & venerable british tradition of taking the absolute piss in otherwise formal & not-having-it milieus…in the fashion of the slave muttering about how cesar is a mortal man…while he gets fêted like a martial god or whatever they give out triumphs for these days
…I feel like I could take it or leave it on the binface side of that coin but if it’s happening I’d like it to happen in the most tabloid-tastic shitty time of it for nigel & all the reform/restore/fuck-off-with-that-yaxley-shitbag types that call it a grand way to make a living
…someone on their domestic beat put it to rutte on camera that eating shit to avoid saying das oranjeboomer drivelled his way to plumbing another rhetorical abyss when you’re in the room with the fixed smile being diplomatic has to make it hard to maintain your self-respect…but…probably my idea of “if this is the game you want to play, nigel…” has about the same likelihood of catching on as the one I’d have been happier to see mustered in the direction of the clearly-never-met-mustard-he-could-cut figurehead on this cursed ship of state…& I know how that turned out?
No one is taking that shit seriously. What is the foundation for Pax Silly Walks?
It’s definitely not law and order. It’s certainly not peace or respect for humanity because Israel is there (and Murrica.)
Just seems a stupid waste of time by an AI dork out of his depth.
…I may have significantly underplayed how beyond short-sighted it currently looks to be as all in on the crypto-tastic c-ic-for-cyber-so-it-can’t-be-for-crime concatenation of clusterfuckery that is the context from which the Mag7 aka the Lag7 aka a clear & present danger to the national interests of the US & by extension the global economy that everyone continues to treat like the gold-egg-laying goose in the presentation the softbank guy gave despite making less sense at a business level than starlink being worth that when its full 12,000 LEO sats cap out around 1% of everyday internet traffic loads
…& positively all of the most expensive parts that do essentially only the one super-specialist variant on how to get a thing that can do all the things like a computer that uses itself…don’t happen without stuff that USA is…checks notes…uhh…not #1 in
…but…the ones running the clownshow are somewhat more sunk costs down than merely all-in…that’s their only stay-out out left that doesn’t come with jail time & confiscated toys
All the “AI will save the world” crap is exhausting. I really don’t understand at what point civilization started blindly accepting absolute nonsense, but now it’s like nonsense is 90% of all discourse?
It’s definitely worse than it has been, because so much of the internet now is bots talking to and about other bots, but in terms of “the discourse is nonsense” I suspect the answer is “it has always been Ohio.” I like to picture 11,000 B.C. me rolling my eyes at yet another hieroglyph portraying this year’s floods of the Nile being because Pharaoh willed it.
Caro Claire Burke is the self publisher of Uninformed Magazine for Women (plus sex tips)? At least Cosmo had quizzes I read to try and be better with women.
So let me understand this. Trump has opened 25 gas stations that sell gas at a relatively minor discount (gas here $3.79, so $3.47 is an 8.44% discount) (admittedly this is before the orange imbecile started fighting with Iran again).
The current population of the US is 343 million people.
What, precisely, is an 8.44% discount at an incredibly tiny number of locations supposed to accomplish?
*Maybe* you could pump it up on social media, but the overwhelming majority of the US can’t get to these locations, and they’ll figure that out in … couple of minutes tops? So you’re actually just calling attention to the fact that you’ve fucked up gas prices and you’re handing gas discounts to a tiny group of people.
What’s the plan here?
I know, I should know by now there is no plan, and this is an utterly desperate stupid gambit. It’s so abysmally stupid that I think Trump himself had to come up with it.
Even better is that if the government is involved in funding this — and I’m 100% sure it is in at least an indirect fashion — then Trump is nationalizing oil reserves … y’know, communism.
Oooh, good point. He’s a filthy Red. Except it’s kind of faded to pale orange.
…I have no idea how it works in truth…but
…if you told me he skipped the open market to tap the national strategic reserve to minimise the loss at the pump & was trying to pump it like a franchise model in a state-backed version of what’s the no-bueno part of the discount stuff that keeps those shadow fleets afloat full of embargoed oil that…by a bizarre co-incidence…may depend less on the passage at hormuz than some other stuff those bypass
…all of which being in service to tailoring content for a vitally-curated lensing effect via broadly specific locked-in vectors with proven triangulation…which a similarly broad definition would allow to be catch-all-ed as “social media”…but could possibly be construed as the unregulated territory of the available informational ecosystem that respects borders little more than it famously does just about anything
…it seems like it couldn’t be that because that would be unforgivably stupid at a level so egregious you’d think there would actually be some sort of globally agreed upon time out while some overhauling happened & we fixed some dials & gauges & slowly brought things back up to pressure until all the flywheels kicked back in & we had some functioning mechanisms of state in more states than not within & without the ones that make the USA when they’re playing away
…but the terrifying part for a while now does seem to have been that…it very much can be that sort of stupid & the consensus is “yup – wonder what it looks like tomorrow – let’s let it ride for today & see where it goes…” with mostly not so much as an appeal to the simpsons bit about “we’ve tried doing nothing & we’re all out of ideas”
…monkey smart…monkey know what time it is…ain’t no business like monkey-business?
…wait…no…that one’s for @farscythe …old ravers never die or whatever…respect to the aged dutchmen in an EDM world…I meant the other monkey business…in the key of classic?
…unless you prefer “the bear scenario”
…but…trying real hard not to wind up with posts longer than ed zitron’s that quote a bunch of his as it is so even that close to trying to set up in the bear corner is playing with fire & I gotta keep an appointment even though I haven’t been appointed to anything I’m aware of lately…so…you know…life ain’t fair…film at 11…if you haven’t picked one before then?
He’s definitely depleting the oil reserves. That’s been documented. I have to assume that part of the “plan” is that Trump is pocketing the money from sales. The full amount, not just taxes. Though I’d bet big that he’s stealing those, too.
…he took it upon himself to “hold” the venezuelan “assets” & generally at this point treats the federal accounts like extension of his criminal enterprise with a supreme court carte blanche…so…really…what isn’t on the table if you’ve ever heard of it in a banana(s) republic somewhere at one time or another?
We already know he takes “stakes” in companies when he doles out federal funding which is also socialism/communism!
But it’s so hilarious to hear him invoking the grim specter of the Iron Curtain shrouding America on Fourth of July and at the same time he’s doing central planned economy shit. He’s nationalizing the socialism! (Yeah, that’s right.)
Meanwhile, Mamdani is like “We should open some grocery stores in places there aren’t any” and half the national punditry required their fainting couches before rising to shriek incoherently about it for months. Because that’s socialism, you see, using public monies like that!
…zohran really having some robin hood troubles when everyone knows you run to be sheriff in nottingham
…much rather be spending today watching disney musical cartoon classics
…being a grown up kinda bites, tbh?
To be fair, one of the perks of adulthood is occasionally saying “Fuck it” and doing what you want. I say it’s “Robin Hood” time for you, sir.
Have you ever seen Monarch of the Glen? I’m bingeing it now. It’s very soothing to me, but I have no connection to Scotland so I can’t get distracted by how implausible all this must be.
…I have seen an episode or two & I haven’t knowingly a bone to pick with it…but…I had a grandmother who sneered at liam neeson’s rob roy because she saw the ad with him in a kilt & “that’s not a real tartan much less a macgregor tartan”…so…fair bit of leeway developed there, perhaps?
It’s sort of weirdly … Admirable? Remarkable? … that there is no grift that’s too minor and no amount of stolen money that Trump won’t go for it. He’s the guy that grabs all the toiletries from every hotel room and steals all the condiments off the restaurant table.
Yeah, it’s one of the few things he’s both quite skilled at and single-minded about. You’ll never see him do the “one last score” thing; the action is the juice!
lol… old man still got it
Democrats vastly out-registering Republicans for this election.
Here’s another sign that Democrats are building a blue wave
Silver lining to the Platner mess: Apparently Concerned Collins had cued up all kinds of opposition research on Platner, which now she can’t use. And without a named target, she can’t start oppo on his replacement. At this point, if Democrats can field a non-Nazi non-alleged rapist, Collins is in deep shit.
Collins campaign scrambling as re-election strategy collapses: insiders
…the UK could probably spare you binface if you give it a minute
…pretty sure there’s someone running on the west coast for a seat in…wanna say congress not senate but maybe it’s governor or a state-level thing…some seat…who also only really has failed bids to be a UK MP to point to on their resumé so it’s barely a stretch if you really want to commit to the bit
…beggars belief you can’t scrape up someone who actually believes in some things people would vote for that isn’t an asshole with all of maine to pull from…maybe if they let other-than-white-south-africans inwardly migrate “the right way” that wouldn’t be so hard to get over a bar where collins leaves that?
I’d take Binface over Collins in a heartbeat.
…at least he’s up front that he’s so committed to the bit he wouldn’t be holding office in the sense he might under his government name
…who knows…he might even listen to people that knew stuff about which way to vote in accordance with the interests of the state &/or nation…which…might be an even bigger novelty act in maine than the costume-clown routine?
I mean, yeah, you nominate a red flag factory and their opponent is not gonna have a hard time pointing at it and shaking their head.
But this is also why you don’t nominate a red flag factory, lol.
I read something interesting about Platner though: he got 70% of the Democratic primary vote, the largest such number of votes in Maine history. Certainly people up there must have known about his red flags, even if the national media glossed over them. Though there was a cult of personality going on there, maybe a large part of the appeal was the message, not the man? And meanwhile Schumer and the rest are desperately casting about to find a corpratist neo-Janet Mills because that’s what the people of Maine really need, if only they could stop deluding themselves and listen to people who know better.
It’s so hard to say what voters do and don’t know, lol. I don’t think the national media glossed over his issues, necessarily? Especially because he was tacitly more left than Dems are usually allowed to advocate for? But it’s always so hard to parse what voters actually liked when it comes to message vs. the messenger and also what it was up against (post-Biden Dems running someone in their late 70s, absolute buffoonery). I do think someone taking up that banner and running in that direction is a good idea, but who the hell knows, everyone’s already blaming every other faction they don’t like and it’ll probably fall to someone doomed from the jump.
Is Binface Pro Dalek or Cybermen?
…he might be like poochy…used to be buckethead…but someone had a rights issue about that…& lo the alien hordes did delivereth unto earth count binface of the not-from-around-here binfaces…& he’s stood against all sorts from may to…not december…but…the floppy haired clown, maybe…rishi for sure…handful of others…pretty much pay £500 to get to photobomb the clip for the count they have to be present for & make it hard to take whoever seriously, I suppose…which if you squint right might qualify as a fine & venerable british tradition of taking the absolute piss in otherwise formal & not-having-it milieus…in the fashion of the slave muttering about how cesar is a mortal man…while he gets fêted like a martial god or whatever they give out triumphs for these days
…I feel like I could take it or leave it on the binface side of that coin but if it’s happening I’d like it to happen in the most tabloid-tastic shitty time of it for nigel & all the reform/restore/fuck-off-with-that-yaxley-shitbag types that call it a grand way to make a living
…someone on their domestic beat put it to rutte on camera that eating shit to avoid saying das oranjeboomer drivelled his way to plumbing another rhetorical abyss when you’re in the room with the fixed smile being diplomatic has to make it hard to maintain your self-respect…but…probably my idea of “if this is the game you want to play, nigel…” has about the same likelihood of catching on as the one I’d have been happier to see mustered in the direction of the clearly-never-met-mustard-he-could-cut figurehead on this cursed ship of state…& I know how that turned out?
If he’s anti-Farage, he’s not gonna be pro-Dalek, but I suspect he might be soft on The Cybermen Question.
Pax Silly Kaka? or is it Pax Silly Walks?
No one is taking that shit seriously. What is the foundation for Pax Silly Walks?
It’s definitely not law and order. It’s certainly not peace or respect for humanity because Israel is there (and Murrica.)
Just seems a stupid waste of time by an AI dork out of his depth.
…I may have significantly underplayed how beyond short-sighted it currently looks to be as all in on the crypto-tastic c-ic-for-cyber-so-it-can’t-be-for-crime concatenation of clusterfuckery that is the context from which the Mag7 aka the Lag7 aka a clear & present danger to the national interests of the US & by extension the global economy that everyone continues to treat like the gold-egg-laying goose in the presentation the softbank guy gave despite making less sense at a business level than starlink being worth that when its full 12,000 LEO sats cap out around 1% of everyday internet traffic loads
…& positively all of the most expensive parts that do essentially only the one super-specialist variant on how to get a thing that can do all the things like a computer that uses itself…don’t happen without stuff that USA is…checks notes…uhh…not #1 in
…but…the ones running the clownshow are somewhat more sunk costs down than merely all-in…that’s their only stay-out out left that doesn’t come with jail time & confiscated toys
All the “AI will save the world” crap is exhausting. I really don’t understand at what point civilization started blindly accepting absolute nonsense, but now it’s like nonsense is 90% of all discourse?
It’s definitely worse than it has been, because so much of the internet now is bots talking to and about other bots, but in terms of “the discourse is nonsense” I suspect the answer is “it has always been Ohio.” I like to picture 11,000 B.C. me rolling my eyes at yet another hieroglyph portraying this year’s floods of the Nile being because Pharaoh willed it.
I came in here for an argument!
Caro Claire Burke is the self publisher of Uninformed Magazine for Women (plus sex tips)? At least Cosmo had quizzes I read to try and be better with women.
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/09/nx-s1-5887107/bonnie-tyler-obit
Thanks for the many good memories of terribly singing at Karaoke bars
Was just about to post…