The Secret Police Playbook
This is an interesting look at who becomes part of a secret police. It's not true believers, but rather people who don't have career prospects in a legitimate military or police unit. They decide to...
Trump To World: Please Help Me Un-Shoot My Own Leg Off
Trump To World: Please Help Me Un-Shoot My Own Leg Off: None of this had to happen. By all available reporting and the variably coherent statements of various officials, nothing in particular...
Disastrous victory
The Sacramento Kings Can't Even Lose On Purpose: Now that losing is exactly what they need to do, they have turned into an accidental juggernaut, proving in the process that the essence of...
You can say no
This is a very insightful article about the author's father, a police officer. His dad could have become part of the policing machine, but chose to be a good person. As the son of a cop who took a...
No choice but to be hopeful
This is a great line from James Baldwin. I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So I'm forced to be an optimist. I am...
Meeting halfway
Terminology, Clarity, and the Question of What Is the Left?: ... if you meet a fascist halfway you're halfway to being a fascist. Hannah Arendt famously said, "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule...
I deny them my essence
Rusty Foster with a couple of great lines in the most recent Today in Tabs. Purity Supreme: I do not avoid camels Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence. ... our never nude horseman of pestilence...
Adding the personal touch
Report: President Donald Trump Is Giving 'All The Boys' Dress Shoes That Don't Fit Right: This is part of a wild story about how Trump is guessing people's shoe sizes incorrectly, and they're then...
A dead and lonely world
Visions of Life / Agents of Death: On Love Thy Neighbor and Love Thy Nature: Donald Trump's world is a dead and lonely world, a world in which everything is for sale and nothing really means anything...
Marry me
I was complaining about the government in 1996 to a friend. I was on a bus at my college. A woman sneered at me and said that I needed to vote if I wanted to run my mouth. I looked her in the eye and...
Hog romancin’ yokel
Great way to describe James Comer. the State of the Union is— oh who gives a fuck, really: oh, please do fuck all the way off, you hog-romancin’ yokel.
It makes my brain do things I don’t want it to do
Hillary Clinton opening statement takes petty GOP to task: I don’t know, I don’t read stuff like that because it makes my brain do things I don’t want it to do, like think.
Hog romancin’ yokel
Great way to describe James Comer. the State of the Union is— oh who gives a fuck, really: oh, please do fuck all the way off, you hog-romancin’ yokel.
Wear a mask long enough
From a forum I'm on: To paraphrase the Uptown Sinclair quote, It is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their self-image depends on their not understanding it. I heard some...
Third US political party
Only way we get a 3rd party is if someone with Musk or Bezos level wealth decides to build a party infrastructure from the bottom up. Fund candidates at the local level, then go to the state level...