I listened to a good part of Blueprint for Armageddon, and I had to stop. It's so, so sad. It's too real.

The "battle" of Verdun lasted 10 months; it was less of a battle in the usual sense of a single let's-fight-and-loser-runs-away event, and more like an open-air industrial blender made of shrapnel and bullets into which a continuous stream of mostly innocent people were ordered to walk over a long, long period of time.

The Somme was similar, but worse because it was bigger. All war is hell, but World War 1 was much, much worse.

You just blew my mind.

I kept wondering why semi-literate politicians with fully-illiterate supporters would write books at all... who is the target audience? What makes it worth the trouble? Like I don't agree with their priorities but I see them as perfectly effective at what they're trying to do; why are they doing this weird thing? Why can I buy a book Matt Gaetz "wrote," hardcover, on Amazon for $10?

This makes it make sense.

"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." -FDR

Also:

Che wants to see California legislators change their approach towards entrepreneurship.

"Make that path easier. Make it less expensive, make it more simple, streamline it. Instead of putting roadblocks in front of it, open it up. Guide people," Che said.

Do we think this guy got a bunch of free money from the government during COVID?

Oh look, he did. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it was a good program and good to make use of it. But, his whole attitude during the article of complaining about how difficult it's going to be to figure out how to use it in such a way where he won't have to pay it back really smacks of "I have never worked in a dishroom or behind a register even a single day of my life."

Be grateful. You fuck. Just like you should be grateful that our economic system gives you a little squad of people to run your business day-to-day for you and you get to keep the profits, instead of complaining that all of a sudden you won't be able to have them do it exactly the way you want them to, whether or not it can economically produce a living wage for them. With lunch for the fancy people and all. You fuck.

I don't think she cares what the actual policy is. The point is, she gets to make noise about the right's well-trodden favorite topic. What's actually going on is of no concern.

TL;DR: "Doe 537" or whatever has been identified as some person you've never heard of, and it's unclear whether that means they were guilty of anything. Also Bill Clinton is in there, although it's also not clear if he was guilty. The only actual indication of wrongdoing by anyone in this fairly long article is here, which I will include with some level of sadness but without comment:

Alan Dershowitz has sought to get numerous filings unsealed, arguing they would disprove Giuffre's misconduct accusations against him as well (the two settled a large number of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits against each other and their lawyers in 2022, with Giuffre stating she "may have made a mistake" saying Epstein trafficked her to Dershowitz).

I nominate "stating she 'may have made a mistake'" as this year's six Hemingway words that by themselves communicate the whole goddamned story from beginning to end.

"Turned on the news in November '89
I could not move, I could not speak
Something was burning up in my eyes
Something wet ran down my cheek
All those laughing faces, all those tears of joy
All those warm embraces of men and women, girls and boys
Sisters and brothers dancing, all singing freedom's song
God, if only I could be there to shake your hands and sing along"
-John Kay, "The Wall"

Bro snuck across the Berlin Wall with his family when he was 5 years old and you got shot dead if they caught you trying to get across. He came to America, grew up and started a rock and roll band, and then as an adult got to watch the wall fall on television and wrote a song about it.

People who got born here don't know what they have.

I'm fairly irritated at myself to report that I just wasted half an hour of my life looking through Rand Paul's report in detail, because I was curious how he managed to arrive at $900 billion dollars. I spent some time with Google Sheets and trying to de-obfuscate his numbers. I'll cut to the punch line. It's:

• $659 billion in interest on the national debt
• $236 billion in "improper federal payments" -- basically, money that the federal government erroneously paid out to people it realized it shouldn't have ever given it to in the first place. This number is, apparently, actually real, and I sort of agree with Paul that it sounds big enough to be a problem. I will note that the number went monotonically up all through the Trump years, up to a peak of over $300 billion, and monotonically down through all through the Biden years.
• $851 million on all the rest of this culture-war bullshit aside from those two single line items

Or, to put it in visual form:

Everything in any news story, about Egypt or lobster tanks or transgender monkeys or whatever, is part of the orange slice of the chart.

Yeah. The US government is one of the biggest and most byzantine entities on the planet. You're going to be able to find some bullshit in there if you look. But that doesn't all of a sudden mean this culture-war pettiness is the whole problem, and the tax breaks and giveaways for the rich and the Death Star defense budget all of a sudden aren't relevant to the discussion.

Among notable instances, the National Institutes of Health allocated funds to study Russian cats on treadmills; photos of Barbies were utilized as identification to obtain COVID relief funds; the Department of Defense lost $169 million of outdoor-stored military gear; $6 million went towards tourism in Egypt by the United States Agency for International Development; and the Small Business Administration provided over $200 million to "struggling" music artists such as Post Malone, Chris Brown and Lil Wayne.

Oh, so it's culture-war bullshit. Neat.

"Who’s to blame for our crushing level of debt? Everybody,"

Oooooh... okay, I get it now. It's a desperate attempt to find a catchy and memorable thing to blame that isn't "we give money to rich people by the trillions and tax them less than we do the electricians." $6 million is like a week's worth of lost tax revenue from any one of 500 different companies. But sure, tourism in Egypt is the problem. Everyone please remember that.