however begrudgingly, one has to hand the administration some credit for finally securing the northern border. no one crosses it into the United States anymore.

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it’s the authentic will of the people when they seem to agree with me. it’s the way the system is rigged when it appears that they do not. (hint: there’s no such thing as the authentic will of the people independent of the system by which it is ascertained or constituted.)

“We allowed markets to produce a class of politically connected billionaires… Now that enough billionaires have lined up behind fascism and authoritarian consolidation, it’s clear…liberal governments…will need to figure out ways to greatly reduce the wealth and social power of that class overall.”

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someone is not even wrong on the internet.

i’d explore them to find out but i’m chicken.

it’s weird how economists say we’re richer than we’ve ever been, and yet there’s so much we used to afford that somehow we no longer can. (and no, “Baumol” is not a sufficient explanation.)

the natural lifecycle of an asset class is 1. succeed unconventionally 2. fail conventionally 3. bailout 4. enjoy state backing and stabilization indefinitely

remember when a New York Times editor got fired for running a Tom Cotton opinion piece arguing in favor of what the President is now doing routinely?

whatever Donald Trump imagines to be true is the sole source of truth. so Donald Trump can always correctly evaluate the truth of things by noting whether they jibe with or diverge from his infallible preconceptions.

TNSTAAFL. We always face tradeoffs.

it’s a sketchy gas station you can walk to, without dodging traffic along shithole arterials. that is at least something of a difference!

the narrow path would be via maintenance and enhancement of soft power through the process of rebalancing. but that seems far from the path the US has chosen.

there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, but eventually it’s going to matter just how much.

“if we are moving away from strictly economic determinants of voter attitudes, it might worth asking about whether the extreme wealth of leading Democrats matters.”

everything is relative. a storm surge of 10-15 feet would have us flooded. we’re “zone c” pinellas.gov/storm-surge/ not the worst, but more at risk than the vast majority of the state.

they intersect. in the 3 years we’ve lived here, we’ve evacuated twice. which was inconvenient but we made little unexpected trips out of them, a tolerable quirk for us of living at a low elevation. but we’ve depended on the extraordinary competence of NOAA/NWS/NHC, which may become impaired.