Yes, I have joined the crowd. All previous posts—all 3,000 of ’em—will remain here. Enjoy!
Socio-Politico-Economic Notes from all over
Okay, this is going to be a bit of a data dump on your asses. I’ve been trying to put the finishing touches on a new novel, as well as goofing off a little, and I was compiling stuff that I was going to get to any time now, and, well, this is the result….
Yo, Bret Stephens! We know you’re a pr*ck! You don’t have to prove it every day!
No, you don’t, Bret. In the course of a “on the one hand, on the other” take on Trump’s foreign policies, praising “toughness” but bemoaning the lack of interest in, you know, “freedom”, Bret is heartened by Trump’s “get tough” approach to Iran: “Iran suddenly seems interested in discussing its nuclear program after treating the…
The Return of Trump: America’s Shame It’s High Noon for America’s soul, and things are looking dark.
When I was all of seven years’ old, I was treated to the following homily via the famous Carl Foreman-scripted western High Noon: In the fifth century BC the citizens of Athens, having suffered grievously under a tyrant, managed to depose and banish him. However, when he returned some years later with an army of…
Shorter John Roberts/Amy Coney Barrett: We’re not 24/7 whores! We’re Monday, Wednesday, Friday whores!
It’s true! The U.S. Supreme Court is definitely not Donald Trump’s personal gumball machine! In a small but genuine triumph for judicial modesty and common sense, only four of the six Republican justices on the Supreme Court rolled over for His Donaldness, while the other, well, stood firm with the four Democrats on the Court,…
“The Message” of Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Good, the bad, and the Disingenuous
To say that Ta-Nehisi Coates’ most recent book, The Message, has been “controversial” is, well, “banal”, although the uproar has most unfortunately been upstaged by the re-election of Donald Trump. It’s more than a bit silly to be lecturing poor Mr. Coates on his sins—though they are, I’m afraid, substantial in their own right—when the…
Billionaire AI King Sam Altman believes in freedom. For Billionaires! Also true: Mark Zuckerberg is pathetic!
Over at Bloomberg, Josh Tyrangiel has an excellent interview with OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, which I found well worth reading, though surely not “definitive,” regarding all the melodrama surrounding Sam’s role in founding OpenAI, not to mention his dramatic dismissal, his dramatic rehiring, and then predictable departure for greener, for-profit pastures. For all I know,…
Everyone must obey the law, says US Chief Justice John Roberts. Except Donald Trump, of course.
Yes, US Chief Justice John Roberts, who makes US Chief Justice Roger “Dred Scott Decision” Taney look like John Marshall (pretty much) has addressed a “warning” to Donald Trump (well, pretty much) not to defy the federal courts in his 2024 Year End Report on the Federal Judiciary, to wit: Every Administration suffers defeats in…
To AOC or not to AOC? Tough question! Very tough!
Okay, I’m pretty late with this one—what else is new?—but the defeat of House Democrat liberal star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the position of ranking minority member on the House Oversight Committee by Illinois Democrat Gerry Connolly, despite the fact that, among other things, Gerry is both 74 and suffering from esophagus cancer, does seem to…
Donald Trump not a nice man, John Bolton discovers
No, Donald Trump is not a nice man, although it took his re-election for this utterly omnipresent fact to penetrate the hitherto impenetrable pate of one John Bolton. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, M. Moustache, America’s most compulsive interventionist, a man who once demanded that the U.S. invade Luxembourg (“and for keeps this time,…
The Curious Case of the Souring Centrists What’s the Deal with Nate n’ Damon?
Over at his substack blog, Notes from the Middleground, Damon Linker has a disturbing—though not in the way he imagines—post up, titled Dialectical Contributions to Democratic Breakdown, commenting on varieties of “bad news for democracies” from around the world—including South Korea, Romania, and, unfortunately, the U.S., which is, unsurprisingly enough, the only one I’m going…