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 It's a 1933 emergency measure nobody repealed, and it's still holding up the roof.
The Bowler, the Leather, and the Long Goodbye
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
foundation
Trump didn't blow up the Republican Party. He removed the rate limit. We're living with the consequences
Political Musing
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.
Tech
The 1960 hierarchy was written down and voted on. Everything that did the real sorting afterward had no author.
movies
What Ben-Hur smuggled, what it built, and why $400 million wouldn't buy it back
Political Musing
Brendan Carr didn't need the Fairness Doctrine. He needed a merger.
House Rules
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.
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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.
Republican officials have spent a decade privately recognizing the danger of Trump while publicly enabling him. Their anonymous anguish is not resistance. It is an alibi.
They vote for Democrats, raise money for Democrats, cut ads for Democrats — and proudly insist they're not Democrats. Fine, keep the label. But surviving the Republican shipwreck didn't make anyone captain of this boat. Part Two of The Empty Creel.
I am broken. The latest dive into how Brown v. Board of Education really changed America, and not entirely for the better, really is why we're where we are today.
The Never Trump movement may have already persuaded nearly everyone it can. Democrats need a growth strategy, not another search party.
The week in review, July 26th through August 1. tot6
The Panthers were a civil rights answer to police violence. The Weathermen were a Vietnam answer to a war that wouldn't end. Everyone keeps mashing them into one story. That mashing isn't an accident, and it erases exactly what each group was actually responding to.
Turns out you don't need barbed wire and a snake dungeon to fight integration. You just need a church, a tax exemption, and about eight years to find a better word for what you're actually defending. The IRS didn't create the religious right. It just gave it a reason to organize.
Wilson hid behind appointees. Mississippi hid behind file cabinets. Leander Perez didn't hide behind anything, he ran two Louisiana parishes like a personal kingdom, built a snake-infested prison out of spite, and got excommunicated for being too much even for the Catholic Church.
