eggstraordinary.

just… democracy? a Congress in which incumbents are safe is a Congress in which constituents are disenfranchised and ignorable.

The Trump Administration is just pathetic at negotiating. It "played tough" and won nothing much from Canada and Mexico with its tariff gambit. It negotiated against itself and conceded all leverage in its negotiations on Russia and Ukraine. Just pathetic.

Credit goes to @dangillmor.bsky.social! It was a while back, but he's the one who pointed us to this amazing nugget, via a Mastodon post.

we're treating migrants so badly when many of us may need to be migrants soon.

same playbook as Afghanistan. which worked really well.

1. Cut social services to the point people who’ve relied upon them become desperate; 2. Protests that can be characterized as disorderly, perhaps even violent, riots emerge; 3. Use the riots as pretext for a crushing response that deters future opposition of any sort.

explains my inner life.

tbf i didn't. i loved and trusted Google for it's first few years, even remember telling friends, yeah, the kind of power they're amassing is dangerous, but i trust these people. by the mid-aughts (ironically when i tried to become a paying customer) i was disabused of any belief in their idealism.

for people who excuse Google's — and now Apple's — capitulation on the orwellian renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as *of course they just use the official name*, please read Google's explicit policy on this question, from 2008. publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2008/04/how-... ht @dangillmor.bsky.social

perhaps worse than a US withdrawal from NATO would be a US that sowed chaos from within the alliance. Europe still requires functional security arrangements.

one day a Russian prisoner is freed (Marc Fogel, great news). the next day the US Secretary of Defense concedes Ukraine’s territorial integrity and aspiration to join NATO. our transactional President sure knows how to strike a deal.

he loves that truth won’t ever matter to the 99% who never check and the ones who do and say anything can’t be trusted they’re on the other side. nothing matters it’s funny!

the calculus is simple. by default, senators get reelected. incumbency bias is extraordinary. but if you put a target on yourself by defying the MAGA-ists, you very well might not. go along to get along. and fewer death threats. the world’s greatest deliberative body.

conceding in advance. the art of the deal. peace through strength.

they believe bitcoin ultimately “wins”, i think. or, to attribute just a bit less idiocy to them, some constellation of crypto assets. the nation state is over, they think. they’re just front running the inevitable. they have bubbled themselves into (very powerful) morons to a remarkable degree.

the ghost stories / horror films write themselves. weird shinings in glitzy golden towers. new cultural frontiers for the tired indian burial ground cliché.

no one told us how entertaining the apocalypse could be. or alternatively, the road to hell is paved with engaging content!