Odds 'n Ends - December 6, 2025
Some miscellaneous thoughts. Read to the end to find a good Substacker to subscribe to!
Time for a grab bag.
First, I had some gremlins in the back end here. I had been ignoring the warnings, but since I had a week off of work, I figured I would roll up my sleeves, and figure out the version mismatch for the framework that this newsletter is built on.
That led to many hours of down-time and me pulling my hair out. I wrote about it here if you want to read about it (this is a published, but unsent article, didn't want to clutter your inbox with my flailing):
Geoff Anderson
Anyhow, I was able to do the deed, remove my fuckups and get it all back. My last word is that the error codes, and the messages in the logs weren't very helpful.
Second, I am growing a little hopeful that enough of the Republican members of Congress might begin to benefit from their calcium supplements.
The furor over the boat strikes in the Carribean and eastern Pacific is finally causing some stirring, and I am seeing tiny shoots that the bullshit stories that the Press Secretary and the DOD are telling are failing to be believed. Still, this has a long way to go before anything concrete happens.
Lucian Truscott IV is my go to, as his background in both journalism, and in the military (his writings about his time as a cadet are must reads). This is what he wrote:
Lucian K. Truscott IV
While not about the boat strikes, this is the kerfuffle that ensued after the "Signalgate" affair.
This time it’s more like the bazookas are out for Champagne Pete, as columnists have become fond of calling him. Stories leaked out of Hegseth’s Pentagon today about the Inspector General report that was ordered several months ago on the so-called Signalgate fiasco. Inspector Generals, especially the ones who are a part of the Pentagon and the armed services, generally do what the boss expects of them. When there’s a scandal, find some cubbyhole of a regulation or SOP – Standard Operating Procedure – to hide uncomfortable information. The attitude over there on the Virginia side of the Potomac is that they’ve got more important things to do than diddle around with an IG complaint that points to some awkward or embarrassing situation involving a deputy secretary or even one of the higher-up generals working for a chief of staff of the Army or Navy.
Delicious!
Third, in the depths of the night on Thursday, the 2025 "National Security Strategy" document dropped. Plenty being written about it, but I will quote from Wendy's awesome take:
Wendy Weber
Wendy has a ... ah ... way with words that just resonates:
The Gospel According to Shitsburger: Europe Must Stay White or Democracy Dies
Let me paint you a picture of how Donaldo Shitsburger's brain trust sees the world. Europe—beautiful, civilized, white Europe—faces not economic challenges or climate catastrophe or healthcare crises, but something far more terrifying to these racist fuckwits: "civilizational erasure."
That's the actual fucking language. Not economic decline. Not infrastructure decay. Civilizational erasure.
The document claims Europe's problems stem from "migration policies that are transforming the continent," combined with "cratering birthrates" and "loss of national identities and self-confidence." Translation: too many brown people are showing up and not enough white babies are being born, and this keeps these shitstains awake at night sweating through their confederate flag sheets.
Here's where my stomach turns itself inside-fucking-out: the strategy explicitly warns that "should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less" and questions whether certain NATO members "will become majority non-European" and whether they'll maintain the same worldview as "those who signed the NATO charter"
Read that again, slowly. They're saying that when countries stop being majority white, they can't be trusted as allies. They're linking racial composition directly to political reliability. That's not dog-whistle racism—that's a fucking bullhorn.
She's right, and the rest of the post is worth the read. If you don't sub to Thistle and Moss, you should.
And the fuckery around what this document is going to do to Africa is just apalling.
The delish? The www.whitehouse.gov web page is running motherfucking Wordpress. I have to assume that the stunted incels that was DOGE is the cause of this.[1]
Fourth, it looks like there is some turmoil in the Trump inner-circle. Rumors are swirling that with the new year there will be some departures to the high ranking staff. A few weeks ago the speculation was that Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was in the crosshairs, but now it seems that the likeliest is Whisky Pete.
Rick Wilson
Alas, this is behind a paywall, but here is a link to a PDF of the article. Worth the read of the first section.
So far, Trump has been remarkably restrained:
When Trump retook office 11 months ago, he decided not to let the media “win” by firing any of the boobs, incompetents, grifters, cranks, conmen, reprobates, skells, Russian agents, and now war criminals he jammed through a compliant U.S. Senate or simply elevated by the political necromancy of designating them as “special government employees.”
Sure, they've laid of shit-tons of public servants, and fired anyone who was anywhere near the investigation of Trump, or any of the January 6th defendants. But big names? The inner circle? That has been tight.
But watchers are beginning to see the signs that the firing tweets are being queued up.
For Trump, in his physical decline, it replaces the power he once had to golf, carouse with Jeffrey Epstein, and give women the 3.8 seconds of pleasure only he could deliver.
But this time, it’s different.
This time, the stakes are higher, the failures are bigger, and the crashing of his polling numbers and MAGA’s power is well underway. He is surrounded by scandals large and small, with leaks now pouring out of his administration like water through a screen door, and for the first time in a long time, he is not having fun.
In the terms he knows best, the show is terrible, the ratings are slipping, and even the supporting cast is quietly looking at their agents and asking, “So what comes after this?”
I look forward to the rush of schadenfreude. Will it be Hegseth? Or Wiles? Or is Ka$h in the crosshairs for pissing off the secret service and FBI SWAT teams being detailed to his girlfriend's door-dash service?
Stay tuned!
Ok, enough negativity, something good...
Time to spotlight a fellow writer. This week (the first time I've done this) I am choosing Cryn Johannsen, whose post from Friday was about the Substack Algorithm:
Cryn Johannsen
As I have left the Substack publishing ecosystem, I am not totally at the whim of the winds of change in the algorithmic enhancement, but Cryn does a good job in this post.
My view of the algorithms I wrote about in the spring and into early Summer when I pulled my properties off of Substack and undertook to self-host them on Ghost. Back then, there was some urgency to close a funding round, as they (Substack's founders) needed operating capital. This allowed the monied Silicon Valley fuckers to have a say in the future. And what I saw was that the push to drive engagement over a quality feed on Notes, and the stifling of growth in the "non-productive" 'stacks being part of the equation to drive growth (also, rumors of infusing an advertising based business model were huge red flags).
Still, Cryn is here, plying her trade, and she shares her experience with engagement and what is a "success" and what is just "meh".
(sorry, context is somethings fall flat...) Then other pieces absolutely explode, things I’ve written that I thought would do decently, but in fact are knocked way out of the park, like by thousands of miles (see here and here). I dunno, perhaps people like my analysis on Trump, but I think it’s more than that.
And that’s when I realize the algorithm is at work, and I face my naïveté, something which is never all that enjoyable, especially as we age. I recently read a piece confirming my suspicions that Substack changed its algorithm model in mid-November. The writer of the piece claims that the new algorithm is based upon the question: “What would be the natural next step for this reader in this moment?” This model sounds a lot like Netflix, at least how it was when I used to subscribe to it, and how it captures what you’ve watched and then populates recommendations for you like it in the future. The claim from this writer, who was somehow enthusiastic about this change, is that this model builds on “reader trust,” purportedly knowing what you liked reading by X-cool-smart-amazing writer, and becoming more committed as a result. But it sounds to me like, as a writer, you have to keep writing basically the same pieces, with some variations; i.e., the spices will be slightly different in the writing, but the overall sauce base stays the same, so it winds up being pretty bland for the brain. So, yeah, in a nutshell (or—since I’m on this theme of food—in a noodle?), that’s how you hit that sweet spot with the algorithm, and gain more readers, plus current reader commitment.
This is at odds with what drives many, if not most writers. Cryn has noticed that writing about Trump critically causes more engagement, and she surmises (likely correct) that this feeds a certain audience on the Notes app, and that to be a success, you can write things that hit this dopamine center. Like clickbait...
And that is what is making Substack a social media platform first.
Enshittification is underway.
Do go subscribe to Cryn's substack. She's great, and she donates half her subscritption monies to a family in Gaza.
That's all for this week folks!
I had the week off of work, and I decided to almost destroy this site (by doing a dumb IT thing).
I did go do Top Golf with two of my staff, that was a BLAST.
I got a new guitar that I will write about soon.
1 - Not that I hate Wordpress, but it is a bit constraining, and one would assume that the motherfucking Government has the resources to build something bespoke...
