Political Musing
Reagan raised taxes twice after his own cuts blew out the deficit. The modern GOP position isn't historically Republican. It's something newer and worse.
Misc
I traded Substack's algorithmic megaphone for Ghost's quiet independence. The math was fair on hosting costs — but audience growth basically flatlined the moment I unplugged.
Couple of notes on the site before I dive into the week's bounteous posts. First, I have always hated the built in search for Ghost. It is really cursory, and it makes it stupid hard to find things I posted in the past. Basically, it solely indexes the
This Fucking Guy
His fraternity house got raided for a weapons cache during the Ole Miss riot. His own memoir tells that story in detail and somehow forgets the part where he led the fight to keep the fraternity segregated two years later.
Political Musing
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's own notepad read: buy Japanese yen, five to ten billion. Three weeks later the same improvisation showed up in the bond market. It didn't work there either.
The Bowler, the Leather, and the Long Goodbye
Linda Thorson never got the chance to fail on her own merits. The show had already done that for her before she read a single line. Here's how The Avengers actually ended, twice.
Political Musing
Trump wasn't a mutation. He was the guy who showed up already carrying the right key. What that means for whoever tries to inherit the lock — and why Flake's "fever will break" might be right for all the wrong reasons — Part Two of The Oxidizer.
The Bowler, the Leather, and the Long Goodbye
Forget the killer robots for a minute. Forget the Op Art sets and the champagne. This starts with a murdered fiancée, a cancelled crime drama, and a contract that happened to expire at the wrong moment for everyone except British television.
House Rules
Nowhere else on earth has the thirty-year fixed mortgage. It isn't a market product. It's a 1933 emergency measure nobody repealed, and it's still holding up the roof.
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Before Emma Peel, television heroines waited to be rescued. After her, the ones who couldn't throw a punch were the boring ones. Also, the BBC paid her less than the cameraman. Of course they did.
I am still on a hiatus from the dark place, where my digging in on the Civil Rights era kept leading me to worse and worse topics, people, and governments. That shit sucks. And all this "American Exceptionalism" mumbo jumbo requires that you ignore a lot of really
Trump didn't blow up the Republican Party. He removed the rate limit. We're living with the consequences
White men fell from thirty percent of American medical students to nineteen. A Princeton professor calls that proof of anti-white discrimination. It is mostly women applying to medical school, and no repeal reverses that.
The 1960 hierarchy was written down and voted on. Everything that did the real sorting afterward had no author.
What Ben-Hur smuggled, what it built, and why $400 million wouldn't buy it back
Brendan Carr didn't need the Fairness Doctrine. He needed a merger.
Nobody was arguing about food. Chipotle is a price index, the complaint was about land, and the reply — eat ramen, and are you a communist — is a slogan from a postwar sales campaign for the thing that's now unavailable.
The Lunchbox from Hell. My first quality amp, and fond memories indeed.
Mike Johnson has spent his entire career legislating what happens inside your marriage. He has finally located the one bedroom he will not enter.
Life was pretty busy this week, and my time to obsess over making certain I had a queue of posts lined up was curtailed. As I posted on Monday, the recent stretch I have covered on the Civil Rights era (the lead up to it, and the bat-shit insanity
The beard is not vetting. A launch video is not a governing record. And a Senate race is a catastrophically expensive place for a first background check. The finale of The Empty Creel: stop waiting for saviors and build the fucking bench.
