It feels to me like the US media is being forced to become an ironing service for cheap, patriotically themed shirts.

I’m not even sure that it shouldn’t have been a “?”, where “please” is an abbreviation for in “can you please?“. But it’s probably an abbreviation for “if it pleases you”…..

I seldom feel more alive than when debating punctuational rectitude!

As a boomer (terminally is not an adjective we like to resort to too frequently!)… But at least we don’t have to share a generational epithet with BJ & Bukkakele.

I’ll be the dead old geezer lying in the middle of the road with an elderly, 105lb golden retriever strapped to his back, trying desperately to find some flesh on the back of my wizened head that it can eat.

I won’t not ask you!

How did I manage to get through life without not understanding what “without not knowing” actually means?

This is just the sort of insightful journalism that makes me realise the inestimable value of my investment in an NYT subscription.

It would be the most delicious irony if, before whatever, inhuman, populist legislation he pushes through was repealed, the last few places at the “El Salvadorian holiday camp for homegrown felons“ were to be filled by Trump, his family and the disgraceful clique that have enabled them.

I can already hear the sophistic counter argument, “are you comparing immigrants to dogs?“.
The answer to that is, “Of course not. The best that the human race has to offer struggles to hold its own against the qualities displayed by even the most average dog.”

You don’t help children overcome irrational fear of dogs by insisting they have nothing to fear from dogs.
If you do, they will look to more extreme solutions for comfort, and the children and the families/communities they inhabit will eventually forget the many benefits of living alongside dogs.

I don’t agree with your framing of this.
Democracy is a system of government which responds to an electorate’s concerns (justified or not).
The first job of the Democrats is to convince voters that there is an effective alternative to the fascist nonsense being enacted by Trump‘s lickspittles.

Live Updates: Trump Hosts El Salvador's President Amid Deportation Battle

WTF the US is now officially a gangster nation!

Why would anyone want to go there if the visit might end up in an El Salvadorian maximum security prison?

www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04...

Basically in rounding error territory.

Meanwhile, the Alphas & Betas make up stuff that suits their agenda.
Deltas and Epsilons cheer wildly for something they believe completely, but cannot understand.
Whilst the Gammas re-read the numbers and worry that they have missed something.

Does that mean that the square on the hypotenuse wasn’t equal the sum of the square on the other sides prior to Pythagoras discovering it?

Strategy without tactics is the slow route the victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

I don’t think the term “leftist” is particularly helpful in this context.

“Left-leaning, ideologically authoritarian dickhead” is, I think, the technically correct terminology.

Anyone who would define someone they perceive as being (even fractionally) to the right of them as a neocon.

And the 2025 “White, bourgeois entitlement award” goes to…….

Anyone else think “Coristine” sounds like the name of an enzyme?
Perhaps an enzyme produced at times of anxiety and low self esteem, which causes an irrational urge to gain power over and inflict suffering upon innocent others, in order to generate the illusion of happiness relative to said others.

In medicine it’s called getting a second opinion.

I just fed that into ChatGPT and asked her to make it slightly more coherent and rational.

She told me to fuck off !

The worlds greatest negotiator at work

By this time, of course the original seed-junkie doesn’t matter. The strategy was that China would control the means of production, and the means of distribution of whatever sparkly crap a world (forged in the needy image of the US) now thought it wanted.

See, I told you it made sense !

They knew that eventually the addiction would (potentially fatally) compromise the addict. (As it turns out this manifests itself in debilitating,orange, pustulating lesions on the body politic).

An economy that they calculated would be perfectly suited to the perceived arc in Chinese economic, technical and cultural development….

A dopamine fuelled need machine, an empire founded not on aggression, but on addiction.
Eventually, and inexorably this junkie state, driven by its need for ever more potent stimulants would create a world economy based on unfettered, free trade in shiny trinkets….

They calculated that a constitution specifically designed to avoid a dictator, a single point of absolute power capable of controlling and correcting the worst excesses of a society drunk on the tit milk of (illusory) freedom of choice, and (metaphorical) agency would result in…..

It’s initial tactical objective was to undermine the brutal hegemony of the British Empire, and set the UK on a path of decline, resulting in a massive geopolitical power vacuum, into which the vast, amorphous, philosophically incontinent nation baby that was to become the US could waddle.

The constitution of the US is part of an impenetrable 350 year strategic plan designed by a secretive group of 18th century Chinese mystics, based upon a detailed assessment of fall of the Roman Empire. (hear me out, it all makes perfect sense)