Sometime TennisWorld contributor, Sylvia’s husband, Cathleen’s dad. Known to cook. New here (joined July 2023).
705 followers 184 following 5,598 posts
view profile on Bluesky
Same here, plus much more advertising and pornbots. But the replies stuff completely derailed the potential for constructive conversations. And I gather journalists and others wanting engagement had traffic throttled by X. It became a negative value proposition.
It’s very possible, but honestly I’d be more concerned about the denominator.
#BREAKING: Judge Breyer has held that the Trump admin. *violated* the Posse Comitatus Act in its military deployments in and around Los Angeles, and has enjoined further use of those troops for law enforcement tasks. The order is stayed through 12 PDT on 9/12: georgetown.app.box.com/file/1973361...
Lunch at the Old Compton Brasserie. Chicken Paillard, Rocket and Artichoke Salad, small beer.
Feels like the flag debate has been kicking around my whole life and it still boils down to: Civic institutions should fly the flag routinely. Sporting occasions and national events, sure get it out. Year round flag on your house, bit weird, trashy. Doing it to "intimidate the forrins", obvs bad
I dunno. I agree with the first part (consensus collapsing), but the “no alternative waiting in the wings” bit is maybe belied by other major changes to the Right?
I think that’s right if you look at 2019-2021, but from Sunak onwards the conventional wisdom was that Labour would be the next government. Very little actual planning (apart from picking the shadow cabinet) seems to have been done.
For example, I had thought Sue Gray was a great choice as CoS if her brief was to help new ministers sort out tactical questions, making sure they knew which civil servants could be most helpful and so on. Complaining that she wasn’t a political player seems nuts.
Yes, I agree. There’s a wider problem for left-of-center parties across the West as the old class/union foundations shift to urban/rural, education and identity questions. But they were very likely to be the next government from 2022 onwards - not having clarity of thought at the top is on Starmer.
One more thing, then I’ll shut up: really good strategic thinking is hard, and takes a while, because you’re choosing among very distinct paths under uncertainty! People should disagree (constructively)! What staggers me is how little of this seems to have been done before the election.
… a handful of focus decisions that would shape the final strategy, which represented real credible choices not false alternatives. Coming up with very real plausible alternative directions we could go in and thinking through the merits of each before stacking hands on the chosen course was vital.
Very interesting. In my job we also used a three tier model to think about the decisions that needed to be made for an effective strategy: policy decisions that had been taken at higher levels which set boundaries; tactical decisions that could be left until the implementation phase; and …
Remembering when the NYT went on a weeks-long bender covering a decades-old real estate deal the Clintons were involved in, in which they *lost money*.
Also behind 80% of the “Bluesky is dying” posts, IMV.
The problem, you see, is all the lying.
Thread. The retconning of 2020-2021 continues apace, with reactionary centrists and useful idiots leading the charge.
“We can design a system that’s proof against accident and stupidity; but we can’t design one that’s proof against deliberate malice.” — Arthur C Clarke, 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Yeah it's not exactly subtle what's going on here
It’s completely memory holed. And mRNA vaccines were rolled out faster than even the most optimistic projections at the start of the pandemic (9 months to approval vs 18 months plus if everything went right) - take those away and the damage done would have been even higher.
Elon Musk is a radicalised extremist openly championing the most racist faction who would deport the Foreign Secretary, the Leader of the Opposition, the Justice Secretary and the last Prime Minister The govt silence about such a level of extremism is craven: infinite tolerance of racial hatred
There are physical limits to how much of a resource in place you can extract, and there is a commercial balancing act between revenue, costs and other places you can spend your investment money. All deposits have estimated recovery factors - produced oil or gas over estimated in place resource.
… international competition. Foreign films that used to play in metropolitan cinemas no longer have significant impact. The nightly TV news shows pay very little attention to overseas stories. Newspapers long ago cut back on foreign bureaus. It’s a country turning inwards.
… all the different influences and people being ready to try different things, and the availability of ingredients. Houston is a glorious city for restaurants. C) The US is, in my view, more culturally insular now than it was 30 years ago when I moved there. US sports involve negligible…
Born British in 1959, moved to Texas in 1995, lived there since (apart from 5 years in Canada). A) The “not British cuisine” post and refusal to acknowledge and apologize is inexcusable. B) British cooking and food is fantastically interesting and varied (so is American food) because of …
NYT Connections: second 100+ day streak ended, sigh.
This is a tactical, as well as moral, error. Musk is spectacularly unpopular in the UK. There's a chance to take the patriotic high-ground, calling out foreign billionaires stoking up violence in Britain, without being seen to dismiss "ordinary people". And you can challenge Reform to back you.
"entirely groundless" This is how public discourse is being is being debased. The GFA expressly requires access to court in Northern Ireland for ECHR. But what Straw says is not tested, just repeated, and so a "both sides" "debate" is created. The actualité drowns. Sad to watch in real time.
Thread.
MAGA got everything they wanted out of Cracker Barrel and they still want to punish the company anyway. Just about the most predictable outcome you could imagine.
This is worth sharing far and wide. Federal Employees and contractors oral history project. Im not involved in this. Just got the link, idea seems to be to create a record of the assault on the American Repuvlic after Jan 2025. www.fecohp.org
US Open 2025 ATP Singles R16 by Generation: Felix vs Nick Felix vs Nick Felix vs Nick Felix vs Felix Rafa vs Grigor Felix vs Nick Rafa vs Felix Nick vs Felix 8 #GenerationFelix, 5 #GenerationNick, 2 #GenerationRafa, 1 #GenerationGrigor
None of the administration’s statements and actions - none - should be presumed to be made in good faith.
I don't think I've used this word much, if ever, to talk about public policy. But some of the things being both said and implied about migrants are evil. And we should say that.
Wir fahren nachste Sontag nach Berlin.
Heute Abend fliegen wir nach London.
Okay, hear me out. A LotR remake, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor
The extent to which ICE is ignoring all civil rights and due process is astounding — and indicative of a culture where they’ve been told they can do literally no wrong. Agency and admin leaders must face sanctions and legal consequences.
The month before a shooter opened fire on children gathered in a Minnesota church this week, the Trump administration cut funding in the state for efforts to identify potential mass shooters and head off their violence. "What could go wrong?" www.cnn.com/2025/08/30/u...
The new Pulte-Trump crackdown on mortgage occupancy fraud is nothing if not selective.
Jane Galt cashes her paycheck, and murmurs a soft “pecunia non olet.”
I just saw someone refer to rfk jr as microwaved mel gibson & i can’t unsee it.
"She did not die defending the Constitution. She died trying to overturn it. She was not protecting lives at a gate in Iraq; she was forcing her way through windows in the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power." New from @markhertling.bsky.social:
Stephen Manning, this guy’s lawyer, is one of the best in the country. It’s very good news that he’s taken this case.
What are we even doing?
A thread of obvious truths that weirdos on Bluesky seem to have a hard time understanding.
Promise tariffs ⟶ faff around ⟶ announce tariffs ⟶ pause tariffs ⟶ promise deals ⟶ court rules tariffs illegal ⟶ appeal ⟶ court order stayed ⟶ make no deals ⟶ 90 days expires ⟶ delay tariffs again ⟶ announce tariffs again ⟶ appeals court rules tariffs illegal again ⟶ you are here
Congrats again, everyone
Thread. Some righteous anger here, thoroughly justified.
@nealkatyal.bsky.social: “You’ve got the president who's imposed the largest tax increase on American consumers since 1993 … and he did it without Congress saying one word. That is not our constitutional structure.”
Made sure he got in 10,000 steppes a day.
No side. SCO 29 FIJ 15. Scotland will play Canada next week for the group win, while Wales and Fiji will play for third place. Those are some very hard Scots women, and they’ll be black and (dark) blue in the changing room. That was a very, very physical match, won by Scots defending.
They were mid-tier players known for being contrarians. They were given power because of loyalty, not competency. So now, they lie: CDC didn’t insist schools close — decisions were local. The CDC didn’t “push cloth masks for three years” — but their idiot base has retconned that into reality.
Put this one in The Atlantic’s hall of fame, alongside “what if Democrats can’t admit they lost”
I would say that if a sensible and realistic Republican Party or conservative party of any name can be revived it's decades off, and we're at a point where the last hope of reviving it is to set fires to stop the blaze from spreading, if you like. Then you consider what it means to rebuild.
Huh. Bunker review upgraded the yellow card to red for high degree of danger. Shows what I know.
"3,000 CDC staffers have left since January, with thousands more gone from the FDA and NIH. The expertise drain also hits cyber defense, nuclear safety, weather forecasting and disaster response."😱 Enabled by a complicit GOP Congress that will live in infamy. www.axios.com/2025/08/30/t...
Try! SCO 27 FIJ 10. That is probably going to do it as a contest, though there’s 20 minutes to go, so…
"83.3% of LLM users were unable to quote even one sentence from the essay they had just written"
Excellent refereeing and use of the TMO process. The Fijian hooker can trot off thinking it was a borderline call, but erring on the side of player protection makes sense to me.
Try! Game on! Scotland just can’t get the ball out of their half.
Tremendous goal line stand by the Scots.
Half time: SCO 17 FIJ 5. Fiji are making awesome line breaks and putting in concussive hits, but Scotland have been better organized. It’ll be interesting to see if Fiji tire in the last quarter.
Also massive polarization, with Republicans organizing around the principle that any Democratic attempts to exercise government power was facially illegitimate.
as the article seems to suggest, all polling points to this ship having already sailed and being far far out at sea
CBSSNHD’s transmission of the Rugby WWC tie between Scotland and Fiji is amateur hour.
Thread. The bodies will pile up.
Hiking the Appalachian Trail, so to speak.
One thing Sensible Centrists refuse to acknowledge - and this was true during covid when people were also saying this stuff explicitly - is these people are eugnenicists who welcome a good plague to get rid of the old, botched, and bungled
I miss the old brand #CDC
(He’s not a rich white journalist, he’s an Israeli bloke with little or no experience of the U.K. dancing for coins from the very online American hard right)
[Raises hand]
EDMONTON: HELP Mayday mayday SOS: both Fiasco and Franca have gotten out of the house through a busted window screen and the back gate was found open by my catsitter I am VERY FAR AWAY! If you are in the Highlands region can you keep your eye out
“… a wholly owned subsidiary of MAGA Inc.”
Got the non updated shot anyway on Tuesday. I had no faith that the updated one would be available in the future.
Thread.
“Forget it, darth. It’s supremetown.”
Supreme’s gonna supreme, Justin.
Supremes gonna supreme, Joey.
It’s the unitary executive theory which (as you know) is only invoked on behalf of Republicans: “look on their works, ye mighty, and despair!” If a Democrat is in office she or he has to get explicit permission from both CJ Roberts *and* Justice Barrett to have the waste bins collected weekly.
Jan Carey is charged with lighting a fire in an undesignated area and in a manner causing damage to real property or park resources — Class "B" misdemeanors, typically resolved in D.C. with a small fine, per this story. He called Trump's executive order bluff.
The Republicans give us the venomous power-hungry racism but you need to go a Libertarian to get “the government suggesting I shouldn’t eat raw chicken is as tyrannical as the age of consent”
The average American simply has no idea how quickly the infrastructure that keeps us safe and healthy is collapsing. These systems run in the background thanks to government employees who quietly do critical work. Those employees are being purged and systems are being destroyed.
This is the classic parricide pleading for clemency as an orphan, and the Trump administration does it constantly. Knowing courts are slow, they charge ahead with illegal conduct, then whine about how disruptrive it will be if, months later, courts finally tell them to stop breaking the law.
Ship has sailed bitch www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Mass shooters since 2018 who were transgender — 4. Mass shooters since 2018 who were not transgender — 4,193. Hope that helps.
People are often surprised to learn that Lee was an officer who never made it past colonel. The purported promotion to general was awarded by a treasonous cabal calling itself the "confederate states of america" which was put down by force by the Union army, which also had superior generals.
“Limited government” conservatives want the government to be limited when Democrats are in charge. This isn’t rocket surgery.
Doomers: The 2026 election doesn't matter, Republicans are just going to rig the whole thing anyway Various red state republican incumbents: I'm just going to quit now because if I run in 2026 I'm going to get absolutely killed
Yeah, Vance is just saying “uppity” in modern slang.
Pete Hegesth keeps talking about a warrior culture, which apparently means masked man kidnapping our allies to send them to our enemies to be tortured. Absolutely shameful.
The maddening thing is that we know EXACTLY how to prevent this. Yes, kids should get vaccinated, test, stay home when sick, mask as much as possible. But even without any of that: Better ventilation and filtration in schools can MASSIVELY reduce viral spread, for all sorts of respiratory diseases.
the founders envisioned a madman potentially becoming president what the founders did not envision was the majority of Congress and the Supreme Court becoming part of a cult of personality around said president. it’s both pathetic and horrifying
Shorter Tom Homan:
The unitary executive theory is always and only invoked on behalf of Republicans: “look on their works, ye mighty, and despair!” When a Democrat occupies the Oval Office she or he has to get explicit permission from both CJ Roberts *and* Justice Barrett to have the waste bins collected weekly.
The problem, you see, is all the lying.
This is illegal. www.gao.gov/blog/what-po...
*Colonel* Robert E. Lee. He was only a general in an illegal army
The National Living Wage in UK aimed to get rid of low pay. It succeeded.
“We get taught to write prompts to create AI slop.”