Political Musing
Recurring instability turns out to be more efficient than defunding. A real cut would have produced hearings. This produced a quiet, rational, distributed exodus that never made the news.
Political Musing
One network built him a branded show and killed it with a one-line memo. Another platformed him for five years and went silent the moment his story got inconvenient. Neither one got fooled.
The Long Arc, a journey of political weight
Democratic AGs sued over the NIH terminations and got $2.1 billion restored to their states. Republican AGs mostly didn't sue. Their states got back $62 million. Same terminations. Different choices.
Geoff's Musical Musings
My introduction to the rich tapestry of the Blues was from my step father, and this movie was a big part of it.
Political Musing
Russell Vought didn't stumble into defunding the government he now runs. He's been arguing for this exact power since 2019, got caught once, and came back with better lawyers.
Geoff's Musical Musings
Been a while, but Joanna Connor deserves the call out. I'll be damned if she doesn't look like she's having a blast.
Tech
The marketed 30x generational leap in AI chips collapses to about 18x once you strip out a one-time accounting trick, and the real hardware improvement underneath both numbers is 47 percent. Not a typo.
This Fucking Guy
Scott Bessent built his career finding the gap between what governments promise and what they can actually deliver. Now he's manufacturing that gap himself, and throwing punches at anyone who says so.
House Rules
Housing fatalism is the only genuinely bipartisan position in America, and it's very convenient for the two-thirds of households holding the asset. Four excuses, four countries.
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A meaningful share of the debt financing the AI buildout is collateralized by one company's promise to buy things from another company that needs that promise to be believed. Oracle's credit default swaps just hit their highest level since 2008. Coincidence is a strong word.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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