Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

“They all knew.”

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

War for Ukraine Day 1,466: A Brief Sunday Night Update

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A black and white cartoon of Popeye's face/head. He is facing to the viewer's left. His right eye is squinted shut and his pipe is sticking out of the right side of his mouth. The speech bubble reads "I yam disgustipated".

Another long busy day, so I’m just going to run through the basics again.

So, calendar spring is here.

Ukraine surviving this winter was not a miracle. It is tireless, professional, devoted, 24/7 work of Ukraine’s energy workers and Defence Forces.

Heroyam slava!

— Olena Halushka (@halushka.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 2:39 AM

For the first time in months or maybe years, Ukraine is liberating more territory than it’s losing, says Come Back Alive Foundation chief Taras Chmut. Russia lost the winter battle and Ukraine keeps fighting, he wrote on X.

— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 6:33 AM

You may recall that Lil Narco Rubio and US Embassy in Kyiv sent the Ukrainian government a communique telling them to stop attacking Russian petroleum facilities in Novorossiysk, Krasnodar Krair, Russia. Ukraine has now delivered its reply:

🔥 Massive combined attack on Novorossiysk, UAVs and maritime drones used. Sheskharis oil terminal hit, – Dnipro Osint

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— MAKS 25 👀🇺🇦 (@maks23.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 6:11 PM

The moment a Ukrainian kamikaze drone strikes a port crane in the Russian port of Novorossiysk.

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— 🦋Special Kherson Cat🐈🇺🇦 (@specialkhersoncat.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 5:21 PM

Monitoring channels are publishing footage of the aftermath of a drone strike on the port of Novorossiysk in russia.

Reports indicate that an oil terminal is on fire 🔥

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 4:37 PM

🪓 Chop wood.
🪣 Carry water.
🔥 Sanction Russian oil.

Novorossiysk is currently receiving drone sanctions, and reports indicate that the oil terminal has successfully intercepted Ukrainian drones with its infrastructure.

🪓 Chop wood.
🪣 Carry water.
🔥 Sanction Russian oil.

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— Maria Drutska (@mariadrutska.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 4:18 PM

Another successful interception 😎

Even if oil prices go up next week, Russa won’t benefit if they can’t export oil from their terminals.

🪓 Chop wood.
🪣 Carry water.
🔥 Sanction Russian oil.

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— Maria Drutska (@mariadrutska.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 4:22 PM

BOOM! Novorossiysk port and oil terminal, russia 🔥 🤩

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 6:43 PM

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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Sunday Night Open Thread

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I really regret to inform you all but I do not have much of anything other than a bad attitude to offer you all. I still have seen absolutely no evidence that there is a plan for anything other than to just bomb and run and then let the chips fall where they may. Trump says something different every time he opens his piehole, we apparently killed scores of girls under the age of 12 at a school, so that should help everyone sleep tonight.

I am so pissed off about this earlier today I was running errands and was driving down a side street and there was a stop sign so I stopped and I immediately started fuming about what is going on and just raged and after like 90 seconds thought this is an extremely long light, snapped out of it, and realized I was at a stop sign. Last night my brain literally broke while I was trying to write the word scissors and got just all wrapped around the axle and could literally feel my brain grind to a halt and lose focus

scisor
sissor
sizzor
sciszors

and then like everything stop working and none of the words on the page made sense and I was dazed and had that “Is this a stroke am I having an acid flashback” feeling and then muttered god damnit and alt-tabbed to duckduckgo and searched for shears+synonym and found it that way. God I hate these people. I suppose along with a quagmire, every generation gets to relive the classics:

Sunday Night Open Thread 31

I guess it is part of the education of the youth to replay all the Greatest Hits, although this time it is the muzak version and the kids are far less prime to buy the bullshit. We’ll have to check in and see if Sullivan has spotted a fifth column in our midst. Just everything about this sucks.

Make sure you write and call your congressmen.

***

It’s late, I am spent, and I doubt many of you are still awake, so I will just stop complaining and call it a night. I convince myself this is somehow therapeutic for you all.

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Foreign Affairs Open Thread: A Sacrifice Trump Is Willing to Make

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I have never seen a politician more directly copy this speech in my life

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— Micah (@rincewind.run) March 1, 2026 at 5:13 PM

Seems like the emerging policy is: you people out there are responsible for setting up your own governments, but if the US doesn’t like who ends up in charge we’ll just assassinate or kidnap them and then the ball is back in your court.

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— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 10:48 AM

…But also we’re not going to bother with actually defeating the repressive forces of the authoritarian regimes or securing their most advanced weaponry against misuse. That’d be too much like work. It’s decapitation attacks all the way down.

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 10:51 AM

again, there is no strategy or coherent theory of victory here, it is literally bomb stuff — ??? — regime change
WH: DO STUFF IN IRAN
OSD: BOSS WANTS STUFF DONE IN IRAN, ALSO NO TROOPS
CENTCOM: I mean, we can absolutely bomb stuff, hell we'd bomb Iran for free. Jimbo you got them target decks?

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— Mike Black (@mikeblack114.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 3:02 PM

Caine: got that Iran stuff planned just like ya asked boss, although I'm not su–
WH: yeah sure cool whatever, make sure there's lots of sizzle reel footage for the poasts, okay nap time
This is a 100% accurate description of what went down here

— Mike Black (@mikeblack114.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 3:02 PM

@slyngstad.bsky.social
Punctuation matters 😒

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— Xela Hart (@xelahart.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 10:37 AM

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Medium Cool – Classics!

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Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.

Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.

Tonight let’s talk about the classics!

Medium Cool – Books That Shaped Your Views of Race

So let’s talk about classics.  But let’s expand it a bit.  Not just books like Moby Dick or Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice or A Tale of Two Cities.

I’m also thinking also about books like The Autobiography of Malcom X and Rules for Radicals and Our Bodies, Ourselves.  Authors like Marge Piercy or Katherine V. Forrest or Maya Angelou and books like The Color Purple.  Books where you found kindred spirits, and could read about people like you.

Two links to help get you thinking.  100 Must Read Classics chosen by Penguin books readers, and faber’s Black History Month Books: Classic Titles by Black Authors.

So… classical classics and irreverent classics and eye-opening classics – and you get to be the judge of what is a classic, it doesn’t have to be on anybody’s classic list but your own.

 

In case you are new to Medium Cool, these are not open threads.

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Respite: At Play in the Fields of the LLMs

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ETA: This was written for Balloon Juice but is crossposted at Inverse Square.

So…

Just this week I learned that through my home institution I have access to a suite of LLMs, including all the usual suspects (Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChapGPT, Meta’s Llama, and Google’s Gemini. MIT’s come up with a very nice interface to interact with all this artificial talent, and I’ve spent a couple of hours this weekend taking some of them out for a spin. (I’m avoiding OpenAI’s offerings both as a trivial protest and because I don’t trust anything about that company.

So far I’ve enjoyed Claude the most (the Haiku 4.5 model, if you’re wondering). Gemini is interesting, if a bit finicky. But what made me howl was the encounter I just had with Llama, Mr. Zuckerberg’s contribution to the genre. Context: over the holidays I  had a conversation with a senior person at another magnificent 7 tech firm who’d just seen a colleague leave to go to Meta who was utterly dismissive of the company and relieved to be rid of anyone dumb enough (in his view) to basically end his career in top-tier tech by grabbing Facebook bucks. Spoiler: after what you’ll read below, I can see where my friend was coming from.

So here’s the setup. I’ve been asking the various models what I hope are zero-consequence questions, queries in which no one could possibly get hurt if the LLMs wing their way to utter bollocks. A typical ask: map out the logical structure Einstein used in his 1905 light quantum behavior. That one tended to get an initial poor answer based on the idea that the paper centers on the then-pressing mystery of the photoelectric effect–a common mistake for people as well as machines. Pressing the models led Claude in particular to a much more sophisticated account of the paper drawing attention to the way Einstein used arguments from thermodynamics to propose the necessity of understanding light as discrete packets of energy.

Respite: At Play in t

The paper was about this new “heuristic” [Einstein’s term] view of light, and the photoelectric effect appears only as one experimental support for that view. (Much more here.)

After three or four trips through the query engineering needed to get a useful result I’d found my way down the list of models at my disposal to Meta’s Llama.  I was bored with light quanta and so asked a different, much simpler question:

“When a stock is overvalued as defined by a price to earnings ratio a standard deviation or more higher than historical market norms for that company’s sector, what are the typical events or analyses that drive that share price back down to the norm?”

Llama gave me a very stock answer that would have been at home in a high school economics class, so I decided to become a little more pointed in my pursuit:

Given that analysis, how would you explain Tesla’s long run of share prices between one and two orders of magnitude over that of other and much larger and more profitable car companies, like Toyota?

What followed was…first unimpressive and then hilarious. See for yourselves below the jump:

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Interested in a Zoom Book Club to Discuss Tom Levenson’s Book ‘So Very Small’?

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Re-upping this announcement from Wednesday.

Interested in a Zoom Book Club to Discuss Tom Levenson’s Book 'So Very Small'?

Hey everybody,

Anybody interested in having a Zoom book club to talk about Tom’s book, So Very Small?

Tom is super flexible, so we can talk about arguments in book and the relevance of the book today and /or we can use the book as a jumping off point for discussion.

It’s looking like we will start in 3-4 weeks, zooming the first two weeks of April, to give you guys time to read the book if you’re interested.

If you’re interested in reading / discussing this book, let us know in the comments!

⭐️  ⭐️  ⭐️

SAVE THE DATES

Wednesdays
April 8 and April 15
8 pm Eastern time

Zooms will start on time and will last 90 minutes.

⭐️  ⭐️  ⭐️

MORE DETAILS

We will raffle off a signed copy of one of Tom’s books – only participants in the zooms will be eligible for that.

If you want to participate but aren’t in a position right now to buy the book, let us know in the comments or send me email.  I’m sure we’ll be able to pair you up with someone to supply a book.

TO RSVP and get the Zoom link

Send email to WaterGirl and reference Tom or the book in the subject of your message!  And don’t forget to include your nym. :-)

I will send out the Zoom links the week of the first zoom, and the same link will work for both.  So not to worry if you have RSVP’d but you didn’t hear back from me.

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Fun Facts That the Rest of Us May Not Know

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As I was reading the discussion this morning about jars that are hard to open, I thought it could be fun to have a thread where we share some of the tricks that make life easier.  And then I got email this morning telling me that xylitol is now being marketed as “birch sugar”.

I’m sure you guys all know that Xylitol is extremely dangerous, and even life-threatening, to dogs.  It’s in peanut butter and some ice cream and other things one might be tempted to give a dog.

Xylitol is extremely toxic to dogs. Even small amounts of xylitol can cause hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), seizures, liver failure, or even death. Cats, ferrets, and horses do not appear to be at risk from ingestion of xylitol.

So then I thought, hey, let’s combine tricks of the trade and some fun (and possibly not so fun) facts that all of us may not know.

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