Chungus Khan

MA friends! A great guide.

I actually think it’s less that they were geniuses and more that they were willing to say, ‘Well fuck, this isn’t working, let’s try something else’ whereas all the southerners from Fancy Lad School insisted on Doing Their Bullshit over and over again even when it wasn’t working

at scale, all problems are math problems

Trump Lose Jet

At a certain point you're not so much arguing with someone as you are arguing with their anxiety & depression, & that's when it's time to check out

This piece was fascinating, getting at a point I'd never considered: bin-Laden's entire concept about what 9/11 would do to America was just... wrong. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

This is basically my grand unifying theory at the moment

Moving from a world of expensive things and cheap people to one of expensive people and cheap things happened only 250 years ago and humanity hasn't really adapted to the change yet.

Ok, this chart is wild - essentially the 'vibessession' visualized. Like, the 'own finances' number is not insensitive to economic change - it was higher pre-pandemic, popped up with pandemic cash, is lower now. But mostly everyone is like, "thinks are terrible ::gestures:: over there, somewhere"

<<Paula Cole Voice>>

I've got buddies who are rangers in the whites and "west coast guys who dont understand prominence or our particularly shitty weather" are a particularly common rescue profile

My favorite sadistic activity is taking smug westerners, who are used to gentle switchbacks that are all but paved to go over 14'ers, on an East Coast death march straight up a boulderfield on a trail designed by a 19th century New Englander hopped up on laudanum

I’ve seen a lot of stories on Trump having the greatest political comeback of all time but we need more stories on the greatest political fumble of all time aka Trump and the affordability crisis All he had to do was repeat 2017 and not f with the economy but he did the opposite

Taxing rich folks more is the closest thing to a "free lunch" we have in public policy right now

If 25% of the population believed that a creature called ‘Glonzo’ caused high power prices by chewing through transmission lines, any competent politician would be negligent in not trying to find a way to exploit this. This doesn’t mean that these people wouldn’t be fucking morons.

Yes as everyone knows, good ads are important, and can overcome a negative political environment. Just ask Senator Amy McGrath

I don't worry at all about terminator stuff, I worry quite a lot about Augmented authoritarianism, and I worry the most of all about a gigantic metastasizing perpetually low-trust neomedieval pile of shit that AI greatly exacerbates and possibly locks in for good.

There's more credible evidence of fraud in search of unlimited breadsticks than there is of voter fraud

I cross-referenced my database of candidates against credible voter fraud cases. GOP politicians are implicated at 50x–38,000x the general public's rate. Yet even if every American voted with the integrity of a GOP candidate, it still wouldn't come close to justifying making voting one iota harder.

Okay, [oil and natural gas] can work sometimes, but what do you do when the [weird orange wannabe dictator's erratic mood] doesn't shine or the [Strait of Hormuz tanker traffic] doesn't blow?

Queen shit

The internet. Vaccines. Space travel. Antibiotics. Roads. Bridges. Canals. Common defense. Public land conservation. Universal rights. The list goes on.

Ingmar Bergman’s The Hangover II

It Green Mile Shining Skeleton Crew Different Seasons

"Within the US itself it might be difficult to sense just how quickly the world is changing ... A carbon energy superpower, the US looks increasingly like an energy island" www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/daw...

The key to winning at both politics and elections is realizing that future opinions — "latent opinion" — is different from what we can measure about public opinion using polls _today_. Future opinion is downstream of both what leaders do *and* don't do today. The future is not exogenous

REPUBLICAN SENATOR: Democrats want you to believe that sending FIVE MILLION DOLLARS of YOUR tax money to MEXICO to “manage” the “Dick Exploding Spider” population is “normal” SAME SENATOR SIX MONTHS LATER: (walking like a saddle-sore cowboy) This is the greatest public health crisis of our lives,

NYU's Aswath Damodaran "said seeing SpaceX’s addressable market of $28.5 trillion made him think the prospectus was written by Grok, the Elon Musk-owned artificial intelligence assistant, rather than a banker. 'This is a hallucination....I would be embarrassed to even put that number out.'"

“Court packing is never ever something you should do” is not a tenable position. It’s trivial to imagine a court so extremely anti-constitutional (and yet 34 senators won’t convict) where court packing would be the necessary lesser evil. The only question is if the Roberts Court is that bad. (it is)

It's like there's a reason Chesterton's Fence exists 🤯 bsky.app/profile/matt...

Someone at work shared this today. Amazingly, the tweet is still live. Not sure any human alive is responsible for more death and destruction on a per-capita basis than Elon Musk... 🤔

A good thread on screwworms. Talking to an entomologist last year, he also added that the pandemic was the first domino. Scientists couldn’t get to the facilities, couldn’t get out into the field to check outbreak reports.

one day you're going to see elon posting "we just cut 200 million dollars going to bull weevil outbreak prevention 😂😂" and then a couple months later the entire midwest will be decimated by the first mass bull weevil outbreak since 1884

There really is a tweet for everything

Hunter Biden is like if Podrick Payne and Bronn were somehow the same guy

It's also hard to express, on a really selfish personal level, how awful it is to see my twinned loves of Reconstruction constitutionalism and the New Deal-Atlanticist administrative state get ripped apart

Finally! The Eagles have agreed to trade three-time Pro Bowl WR A.J. Brown to the Patriots, who will send a 2028 1st-round pick and 2027 5th-round pick to Philadelphia, sources tell The Insiders.   After months of speculation, it’s about to be official: A.J. Brown is a Patriot.

a small part of the problem with AI is that even if you see good use cases for the technology, focusing on them is a little like saying radiotherapy is going to be great for treating cancer while stores still have radium toothpaste on the shelves www.404media.co/hackers-simp...

Do we have a spending problem? I argue no. Short 🧵 Here's a graph of all program spending EXCEPT Social Security and Medicare from 1950-present (with projections through 2056). It's already way below average, moving towards historic lows. So clearly that part of the govt isn't a "problem."

[IMHO, the 6th American Republic has ended: 1. Articles of Confederation, 2. Philadelphian System, 3. Reconstruction, 4. Redemption/Lochner, 5. New Deal, 6. Second Reconstruction. But YYMV. My main demand is that people include the Articles in their numbering]

New report: wind and solar are driving down wholesale electricity prices across Europe. On average, prices were ~24% lower in 2023–2025 than if gas had set the price at all times. Thread below👇

Nice post from Arin. Raising the minimum wage in Florida, Arizona, Nebraska and Missouri led to higher wages for workers and had no measurable effect on employment arindube.substack.com/p/these-repu...