Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

You cannot shame the shameless.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

T R E 4 5 O N

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

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War for Ukraine Day 1,060: Russian Bombards a Cathedral Among Other Ukrainian Civilian Targets

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Painting by NEIVANMADE. It has a white background an in the center are Soldiers in green doing air defense by firing at incoming Russian missiles in the upper right. The missiles are red and yellow. In the upper left, written in green, is the text: "SAVE THE BRAVEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!" Below the Soldiers, also written in green, is "SUPPORT FOR KHARKIV"

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

The Russians hammered civilian targets in Ukraine. Including a cathedral in Zaporizhzhia.

Russian forces launched a ballistic missile attack that caused significant damage to the historic St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Zaporizhzhia.

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) January 18, 2025 at 6:33 AM

You are looking at what was a church in Zaporizhzhia, until russian missile hit it today.

This is for everyone who still thinks russia is some kind of protector of religion: russia really doesn’t care what to ruin next.

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— Margo Gontar (@margogontar.bsky.social) January 18, 2025 at 8:30 AM

Rescuers have recovered the body of a man from beneath the rubble at the site of the russian missile strike in Zaporizhzhia. Ten other civilians were injured.

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— Iryna Voichuk (@irynavoichuk.bsky.social) January 18, 2025 at 11:35 AM

A friend wished me a quiet night. No, it wasn’t. After drones overnight, Russia attacked Kyiv with ballistic missiles this morning. Three people killed, caught right on the street near Lukianivska metro station.

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— Maria Avdeeva (@mariainkharkiv.bsky.social) January 18, 2025 at 3:54 AM

Here’s the air defense tally:

🛡️ Ukrainian air defences down 2 out of 4 ballistic missiles

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— Ukrainska Pravda 🇺🇦 (@pravda.ua) January 18, 2025 at 3:29 AM

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

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One-Way Trip to Heaven

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One-Way Trip to Heaven

This is an interesting piece about David Lynch and smoking:

Lynch, by his own account, smoked his first cigarette at the age of eight (which is four years older, incidentally, than Sailor Ripley in Wild at Heart). Smoking was part of his identity as a painter and film-maker. It calmed his nerves and focused his thoughts. “It was part of the art life for me,” he told Sight and Sound last year. “The tobacco and the smell of it, and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work or thinking about things. Nothing like it in this world is so beautiful.”

But if Lynch’s cigarette habit was the making of him, it was eventually, inevitably the unmaking as well. Smoking ruined his health and shortened his life and by the time he finally quit, in 2022, the damage was done. He was diagnosed with emphysema, rarely left his house and required supplemental oxygen to even walk a short distance. Smoking, he confessed, was entirely to blame. He urged others to quit and said that he wished he’d done so much sooner. He’d tried to give it up before, he explained. “But when it got tough I’d have that first cigarette and it was a one-way trip to heaven.”

It’s a bit of a taboo to talk about the joys of smoking, since the consequences are so dire.  Fresh Air is playing its old interviews with Jimmy Carter, and one of his post-Presidency projects was writing poetry.  He had a poem about his dad, and Terry Gross asked him if he shared it with his family (other than his wife).  His answer was no, because they had all died of smoking-related illness before he wrote his poem — for some reason, Jimmy never smoked.

Still, one of my first memories was my dad taking me to the bowling alley and smelling the first moment of a lit cigarette.  Lynch was right — is there any better smell in the world?

Then there’s the calming effect of smoking. There’s an association between depression and smoking since nicotine has an anti-depressive effect.

When I first heard that Lynch had died of emphysema, I thought about the many stories my dad (a small-town doctor) told me about the last days of people I had known in our small town who were smokers.  There was one of our neighbors, a really good guy, who admitted himself to the hospital bent over at the nurses’ station because you can get a little more oxygen that way. There was the father of a friend of mine who had a stroke (almost certainly due to his smoking and drinking).  When I visited him in the hospital, he knew who I was, and his furious, frustrated gesturing when he saw me was due to the obliteration of some part of his brain.  Mercifully, he died a few days later.

I’m not a smoker — I used to smoke cigars on occasion (not inhaling), but I quit because the morning after isn’t worth it.  My dad smoked a pipe but quit so he could spend more time with his grandkids (it worked, since he’s doing well at 94).  Still, nicotine, man, it’s a hell of a drug.

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Who is Elle Reeve, and Why Would You Want To Read Her Book?

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Who is Elle Reeve, and why would you want to read her book?

Let’s see.  For starters, Cole has known Elle Reeve for a long time, she’s written a terrific book, and we’re lucky that she is up for having a couple of book club zooms with us in February.

We also know she’s smart, because when I asked her to send me a blurb that I could use for this post, she enlisted a friend of hers to write it for her.  Self-promotion is hard; outsource whenever possible!

“Named one of the best books of 2024 by The Washington Post, Elle Reeve’s Black Pill is a wild ride into the dark heart of political discourse on the internet and how it has come to be a decisive factor in our current politics. Over a decade of reporting, Reeve unearths hundreds of as-yet-unseen documents and exposes some of the most notorious leaders of American far right groups in dozens of hours of exclusive interviews. This unique raft of reporting goes deeper than ever to explain just how these nefarious forces conspired to propel Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 and drove real-world political action in Charlottesville in 2017 and at the January 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C.

With this clarity comes a more nuanced understanding of not just how it all happened, but also how those who oppose creeping fascism can fight back.

Reeve’s unique voice, sharp observations, and penchant for dark humor are propulsive. Black Pill is an essential and entertaining read for anyone interested in how we got to this moment in American political history, what might happen next, and how to affect change.

Excerpt from Vanity Fair.

Link to the Washington Post review.

NYT Book Review.   (If You Want to Understand Why Democracy Is Under Attack, Read This Book.)

Excerpt in Book Riot.

We’re looking two different zooms.  One for the part of the book that talks about Charlottesville in 2017; the other for the part about the insurrection on Jan 6.

If you’re interested, chime in!  If you think you’ll want to participate, what would you think of having the 2 zooms on Saturdays, two weeks apart.   Do you think maybe a month from now to start, since you’ll need time to get your hands on the book and read it?

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

The book is available on Amazon and elsewhere.

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Too Damn Bright

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This is a fascinating, long piece about how LED headlights got so bright, how government regulation is sidestepped/manipulated since the measurement of brightness can be elided by the new tech, and how a couple of guys on Reddit have made it their mission to make headlights dimmer.

There appear to be two types of drivers in North America these days: those who think about headlights only when one of theirs goes out, and those who fixate on them every time they drive at night. If you’re in the first camp, consider yourself lucky. Those in the second camp—aggravated by the excess glare produced in this new era of light-emitting diode headlights—are riled up enough that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration receives more consumer complaints about headlights than any other topic, several insiders told me.

It’s not just in the aggrieved drivers’ imaginations. Going by the publicly available data of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, headlight brightness has roughly doubled in the past 10 years—although you probably don’t need convincing if you’ve been paying attention over that span. Something happened out there, and a zap of light causing you to grimace behind the wheel suddenly went from a rarity to a routine occurrence.

My anecdata on this is that our van was one of the last vehicles to have older-school halogen headlights, and even though it’s a tall vehicle, I hardly ever got the “your brights are on” flash from other drivers after dark on two-lane roads.  In the first night roadtrip in our new truck, which has LED headlights and has headlight auto-dim (which works well), we were getting those flashes all the time, even though the headlights were dimmed.

Anyway, this has been sitting in my tabs for a long time, and hopefully it’s a bit of a distraction from other, more ugly topics.

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Contra Podhorzer

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A while back, I posted about Michel Podhorzer’s election analysis showing that Harris’ loss was driven by stay-at-home anti-MAGA voters who sat on their couches rather than voting.  Now another analyst, Eric Levitz at Vox, disputes three of Podhorzer’s conclusions:

1) Voters who backed Biden in 2020 — and then stayed home in 2024 — are not necessarily resolutely anti-Trump.

Podhorzer’s argument assumes that Biden voters who stayed home in 2024 could not have done so out of sympathy for any of Trump’s messages. But there’s little basis for that assumption. Low-propensity voters are less ideological than reliable ones, and voters often choose to sit out elections because they are conflicted, agreeing with some of what each party has to say. There’s reason to think that this dynamic drove part of the Democrats’ turnout problem in 2024: Both polling and geographical voting patterns indicate that low-propensity voters became more Republican-leaning during the Biden era.

2) Young, first-time voters turned against the Democratic Party.

The electorate’s youngest voters appear to have been far more right-wing in 2024 than in 2020. This is not a problem that can be attributed to mobilization. Republicans seem to have simply had greater success in appealing to first-time voters last year than they have for a long time.

3) In the Biden era, American voters did become more conservative in some of their values and priorities.

Contrary to Podhorzer’s suggestion, there is considerable evidence that voters grew more right-wing in their attitudes toward immigration and criminal justice and more likely to prioritize those issues. Meanwhile, the electorate also grew more confident in the GOP’s economic judgement.

Since I posted  about the Podhorzer piece, I thought I’d also post a piece that pushes back a bit on his conclusions.  That said, Podhorzer’s piece is more numbers-driven (relying more on real turnout data), and Levitz’ piece is more polls driven (relying on both pre-election surveys and exit polls).  The best case he makes is for (2) since it also relies on registration data (specifically in North Carolina).  He also thinks that Democrats don’t necessarily need to moderate their positions on crime and immigration (since they already have) and that they should avoid over-reaction (such as what’s happening with the Laken Riley act.)

Finally, I think the main conclusion that I’ve come to in reading the serious post-election pieces (by which I mean those that use real numbers to back their arguments) is that a tight election like this one is open to a lot of different interpretations that seem plausible depending on which numbers you pick.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Our 28th Amendment, If We Can Keep It

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This is a nice thing to have for three days. Enjoy your Equality Weekend, ladies!

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— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek.bsky.social) January 17, 2025 at 10:15 AM

… Which, of course, we almost certainly can’t — not given the incoming maladministration, and America’s long history of general and specific misogyny. But I do appreciate the gesture, even while wishing President Biden had done this even a few weeks sooner.

Ed Kilgore, at NYMag — “Biden Says ERA Is Ratified, But Supreme Court Gets Final Say”:

In one of those why the hell not? gestures open to a president down to his last weekend in office, Joe Biden declared the Equal Rights Amendment ratified and thus the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A host of feminists and Democratic politicians have been urging this step from the moment Biden took office, based on three recent state ratifications (Nevada in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020) executed in defiance of a 1982 congressional deadline that ERA proponents failed to meet (35 of the 38 required ratifications had happened by then). Indeed, the House formally repealed the ratification deadline in 2021 and dismissed as legally ineffectual actions by five conservative state legislatures to rescind prior ratifications. But the Senate never acted, leaving the whole question in legal limbo.

From a technical point of view, the national archivist has the power to recognize ratified constitutional amendments by officially publishing them, and Biden urged this obscure official to do that with the ERA. But in December, anticipating this action, the archivist denied she had the power to do so. She cited prior legal precedents suggesting the 1982 deadline was indeed valid, not to mention ongoing litigation over the Virginia ratification…

While there have already been rallies at the National Archives to dramatize the issue, there’s every indication that the whole controversy will wind up at the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority is not terribly likely to redeem the decadeslong push for an ERA. But Biden’s action will revive the topic and all the underlying issues of long-postponed equality until such time as the Supreme Court acts.

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Falling Star

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why does it look like The More You Know logo is crashing back to earth

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— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff.bsky.social) January 16, 2025 at 6:54 PM

Omen-ous 2025?

Folks, uh, this is your captain speaking… it appears that Elon Musk's rocket just blew up directly above us. The FAA has asked me to inform you that if a chunk does take us out, you will have died for a worthy cause: allowing unlovable dweebs to believe colonizing Mars is a real, worthwhile goal

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.io) January 16, 2025 at 7:25 PM

This is extremely dangerous

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— Eric Roesch, Rude Law Dog (@esghound.com) January 16, 2025 at 7:08 PM

Gosh, did they not have enough masculinity to keep it up?

— Michele Miller Galli (@mgalli.bsky.social) January 16, 2025 at 9:07 PM

I’d be laughing louder if Elon wasn’t getting tax payer money for his ego projects. Oh, and F Elon.

— njcnlr.bsky.social (@njcnlr.bsky.social) January 17, 2025 at 8:27 AM

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