Weekend Vibes [DOT 8/2/25]

8/2/25 MegMegMcGee 23
Image via Shutterstock

I think we’re getting some snow this weekend. I’m kinda over it! I have book club this weekend too and I’m 2/3 of the way through the book…back to my Kindle. Have a good one.

Of course.

Kash Patel was paid by Russian filmmaker with Kremlin ties, documents show
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/07/patel-fbi-russia-lopatonok

Trudeau says Trump is serious about wanting to annex Canada
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/07/trudeau-trump-canada-annex

This sounds fun – let us know what else you’re reading or listening to on Brain Drain.

‘He smashed his iPad and headphones. My lyrics got torn up’: inside Elton John and Brandi Carlile’s explosive duets album
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/feb/07/elton-john-brandi-carlile-interview

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23 Comments

  1. kinda getting the impression that tomi lahren doesnt know american made really means american assembled using parts from everywhere

    just like everywhere elses made in means

     

  2. …look…I know there’s a million & one other things that are arguably more important than each other all vying for more attention than anyone has hours in the day…& a few of them I get hung up on that don’t get lots of traction so I seem like I’m down some tinfoil-lined rabbit hole…but…come the fuck on

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/02/04/national-science-foundation-trump-executive-orders-words/

    …I’m not just being all “words mean things motherfucker – quit torturing the bastard things”…that part’s a given at this point…but…if you start doing things like saying you can strip funding from any study that uses the terms “biased” or “excluded” in their write up…literally anything with an analysis of its own dataset that is even within sight of being rigorous is immediately on the table…if they really did review everything that pinged when they list their preferred buzzwords in their dogwhistle keyword search they’d be the ones swamped with too much to process

    …it simply is not credible that this isn’t exactly the worst version of what it could be that it absolutely looks like…& it isn’t the sort of thing to happen immediately…like the dollar falling out of its top spot as the global reserve currency of choice…but…if the english language ceases to retain the spot it assumed the way latin used to roll as far as academia is concerned…because you stop being able to get real science published or funded in nu-america® because of the crusade trying to treat objective fact & physical reality like henry treated the monasteries during “the dissolution”

    …I’ll buy that it’s credible that you could sell the phantom lard bucket of mar-a-lago on it being all about saying you’ll do the sweeping thing but actually just cherry-picking your way through this whole farenheit 451 routine like it isn’t autocracy 101…but…he doesn’t read academic papers…at some level in this procedure…someone at least has to glance at the abstract for something to see if they file it under dangerous-knowledge-that-must-be-destroyed-&-discredited or not…&…to be willing to undertake that exercise as instructed…you have to be the sort of person that makes me feel like if there really is such a thing as natural justice it’ll turn out to be the reincarnation lot that have the right of it when it comes to the life hereafter

    …gonna be a bitch being a self-aware lifeform if all these fuckers come back as actual slime all at once because they went & artificially induced a judgement-day-level cataclysmic step-change in human population…but…single-cell organisms don’t take up much space & if we cultivated them we could probably keep them going long enough to give purgatory a run for its money & maybe use the whole thing like a sin-bin to keep racking up open goals while team why-not-do-something-better had the numerical advantage?

    • It’s going to get even worse for them.

      If I had faith in the leadership at those organizations, this would signal a shift in their coverage, and they’d stop thinking that reporting = repeating what officials tell them.

      After about four years of the Vietnam War, major outlets realized that the Pentagon was just blowing smoke, and they freed up reporters to collect truly independent information, and the country finally got a clearer picture of what was happening.

      But the leadership is either complicit now, or too stuck in their old ways of thinking to do anything but let DOD continue to run the Iraq War playbook, even though that blew up on outlets too.

      • Right but it was exactly that independence during Vietnam and then Watergate that birthed Fox. Ultimately nobody at that level wants independence. Their lives are much more comfortable than ours. They don’t give a shit about these things because they’re simply viewed as inconveniences, not real threats—because they’re not real threats to THEM and never will be. They have their money. They have their resources. When push comes to shove they will always cozy up to anyone who enables them to keep it—which they will as long as they do what they’re told.

        • They used to be more comfortable. What they’re doing now is driving away much of what’s left of their audiences, Washington Post style, and living in a fantasy that AI will somehow save them.

          This stuff is eating at the execs now, a recession would make things even worse for them, and there’s a very real chance radicalized courts open the door to targeting them in a new wave of defamation cases, regardless of any payoffs and complicity they do now.

          There is no plan. There may be some kind of delusion that they can maneuver their way through this, and while it’s possibly predictable, it’s not rational behavior. It’s like a rat with a toxoplasmosis infection in its brain. It’s predictable that it loses its fear of cats, there’s an identifiable cause, but it’s a pathology all the same.

  7. In a small bit of Leopards Eating Faces, Pamela Paul has been RIFed at the NY Times.

    This is a great take on her, and the larger phenomenon of “reactionary liberals” like her.

    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/pamela-paul-goodbye-to-the-new-york-times-opinion-columnist.html

    It talks a little bit about her former marriage to Bret Stephens to illustrate how she doesn’t actually believe in standing up for important things or the value of two way debate. And it includes this great writeup of the elites who have been preaching bothsides nonsense for decades now:

    Of reactionary liberalism, we might say the opposite: It is a populist movement of the elites, an explicit bid by the intelligentsia to defend its bourgeois way of life on the grounds that its exceptional moral sensibility gives it unique access to the human experience.

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