Zach Rabiroff

It's a huge relief that the actual movement of crude oil does not affect the price or availability of crude oil, apparently

The implication is that her decline was something of a personal choice: she'd rather have remained in her mind at the peak of her silent fame than face whatever followed.

An interesting thing to observe is that DeMille actually did receive and read her screenplay.

Her age is, I think, an overlooked but key aspect of the movie: it's theoretically plausible that she could have a comeback, if she weren't irretrievably nuts.

Josie, we all love you

Once Newsom no longer has an automatic platform as governor, he seems very clearly set up to be a media chimera who's rapidly forgotten. I think he knows this, and his podcast is a (completely vain) effort to keep himself in the conversation after November.

Israel-Palestine, famously a region that had no history of violent conflict prior to industrial modernity

I'm not personally sympathetic to isolationists, but I'm saying I would understand opposition to huge military spending on a basic moral level.

If the takeaway were eye-popping horror that we spend the equivalent of several national budgets on a permanent standing invasion force, I'd totally get it, but that's generally not why people get mad about it

"Americans hate everything except two specific left-wing Catholics" is a great little sentence that would have given almost every Founding Father a stroke.

See also the completely disastrous Russian socialist cult of the noble peasantry, which survived approximately half a decade of political contact with actual peasants.

The thing about Marx is that he adored industrial modernity as much as a Rockefeller. He wrote about railroads the way tech geeks write about Claude Code. He just wanted the fruits of capitalism to belong to better people than capitalists.

Dude's entire career was chairing fractious meetings and writing cutting articles about them, he would be nauseatingly inescapable on bluesky

Oh, so you're just going to sit there and watch a movie? While measles exists?

They should do one for the cabinet and senior white house staff, that would be fun

With respect to the original quoted post, that is one of the most wrong goddamn statements I have ever read in my life.

It's the most extreme case of what the entire 21st century market has become in a macro sense: the world's largest and lucrative ponzi scheme, waiting for someone to be left holding the bag.

Oh, you know, passers-by. Neighbors. Citizens of good standing.

I frequently find, upon reflection, that I have often been punched in the face

One thing to consider is, were you recently punched in the face

"Submarine rescue team admits no communication from Lindsey Graham for past 36 hours"

Do we suppose this paragraph is worse, on a religious level, if it was written by a machine, or if it wasn't?

There are at least three plausible reasons for that, but all of them point toward a tentative invitation of a ceasefire, which one presumes Trump is about to accept whether or not he says so

The only thing that could drive a corkscrew into Trump's advantage would be if he gets bogged down in Cuba and Iran simultaneously decides to start firing into the straight again. They have absolutely no reason to do that, and unlike the US, their actions generally make sense.

Right, the ceasefire is essentially like one of those periods of calm during the 100 Years War, when France and England would stop fighting long enough to draft more sword fodder and then resume where they left off

I also think that while we probably could bomb them more or less indefinitely, we couldn't do it while also reserving the necessary forces to overthrow a president somewhere else

I think it was probably Graham who just stumbled over his words there, though I'm not about to discount the possibility he just means that everyone's dying day will be the same one that Jesus comes back.

We could probably do a great service to traders the world over by simply setting up an automatic filter for them against anything the president ever says into a microphone

They know in the back of their heads that disaster is theoretically conceivable, but a firm word from their favorite dad gets them reassured all is well

You know, Bill Shakespeare can't see your Hamnet jokes, but the 1,543 people named Hamlet currently residing in the UK and the 21 currently residing in Ireland can.