Thom_

"Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome." - Charles Munger

[Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi]

“She finished in like 500th place in 2020 w/zero delegates despite friendly media, was handed the nomination in 2024 and somehow did 8% worse among black voters than her dead white predecessor Joe Biden, but is she right for 2024? Ta-Nehisi Coates investigates”

https://t.co/lKfwxsw0lx

[Thom_ @Thomist_]

@TheLastRefuge2 G1 plus selection of unruly provincial governors

[TheLastRefuge @TheLastRefuge2]

This was always the purpose and intent.

The UK govt could never get support for requiring identification in order to use the internet or social media.... The social media "age bill" is the workaround.

[Jack Straw @JackStr42679640]

The most dangerous 77 seconds ever recorded by a psychiatrist just broke containment again.

Thomas Szasz, the man the entire profession tried to erase, looked straight into the camera and said:

“We do not have an epidemic of mental illness.
We have an epidemic of psychiatry.”

Too fat → illness
Too thin → illness
Too happy, too sad, too much sex, too little sex → all illnesses

No free will, no responsibility left — only “chemical imbalances” fixed by products you can advertise on TV while alcohol cannot.

This forgotten 1:17 clip is now exploding across every timeline for a reason.

Jacob

[Anas Alhajji @anasalhajji]

This is a must read.... 👇👇👇

[Tim Pettit @Tim_Pettit_]

@Devon_Eriksen_ This is well said in terms of historical and political realities.

No one wants violence to erupt in their societies but likewise no one wants irresponsible government that fails to govern in the interests of the nation.

[Thom_ @Thomist_]

@DoItForMaMa @MrDanielBuck PDF copy available here

https://t.co/84rDCrb8lv

[Thom_ @Thomist_]

@DoItForMaMa @MrDanielBuck See Charles Hollander's 1997 essay "Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49"

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

Moving from votes to "ballots" resembles in some ways moving from the gold standard to fiat currency. The ballot becomes more of an object in itself than a receipt for an underlying thing that's intrinsically valuable. A free-floating abstraction in an increasingly abstract game.

[Supersonic Redhead🛫 @Supersonic_Red]

There’s a generation a lot of people forget exists. We were born at the tail end of the Boomers, but we are not culturally the same as people born in the 40s and early 50s. We are Generation Jones.

And honestly, it explains a lot.

We grew up in a world that still felt fundamentally analog, but we were young enough to be dragged headfirst into the digital revolution. We are the bridge generation between rotary phones and smartphones, between slide rules and AI, between Walter Cronkite and algorithm driven media.

We remember when there were only a few television channels and the entire country watched the same thing at the same time. We also adapted to the internet, email, forums, social media, streaming and now artificial intelligence. We lived before and after the technological singularity hit everyday life.

That is not a small thing.

People born in the 40s came of age in a post World War II America that was still industrial, deeply hierarchical and institutionally stable. Their formative years were shaped by the Cold War, Vietnam, the civil rights era and a society where information moved slowly.

Generation Jones came later. We inherited the aftermath of all of that.

We were the kids who watched Watergate destroy blind trust in government. We watched manufacturing begin to collapse. We saw divorce rates explode. We were the first truly latchkey generation in massive numbers. We learned independence early because many of us had to.

We grew up with one foot in old America and one foot in whatever this new thing was becoming.

We played outside until the streetlights came on but we also learned DOS commands. We learned cursive and keyboarding. We had card catalogs and Google searches. We went from vinyl records to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s to streaming in one lifetime.

We remember maps. We remember memorizing phone numbers. We remember life before GPS and before every human interaction became filtered through a screen.

And because of that, I think Generation Jones developed a very unique perspective. We are adaptable because we had no choice but to adapt. We learned technology as adults instead of being born into it. We remember a slower world but were forced to survive in a rapidly accelerating one.

That creates a very different mindset than either older Boomers or younger Gen X and Millennials.

A lot of us also reject the caricature people now associate with “Boomers.” We were not buying houses for the cost of a sandwich in 1965. The interest rate on my first house was over 14% and that was after buying down a point. Many of us got hit by recessions, outsourcing, pension collapses and economic instability just like younger generations did. We watched promises evaporate in real time.

We understand older generations because we were raised by them. We understand younger generations because we had to evolve alongside them.

That’s why the Jones generation often feels culturally homeless. We are rarely discussed, rarely defined and usually lumped into categories that don’t actually fit us.

But we exist.

We are the human transition point between the industrial age and the digital age.

And frankly, there will probably never be another generation quite like us again.

[Thom_ @Thomist_]

@walterkirn See season two of True Detective for some mythic level (the Greek Tragedy kind) particulars

[Thom_ @Thomist_]

@buffalocharging @Zigmanfreud @californiapost @hotmicsbilly Yeah, sure thing buddy, I feel so relieved by your assurances. Alas, others who actually know shit (as opposed to those who just make shit up), appear to disagree

[James Bradley @JamesBradleyCA]

🚨I’ve been fighting this since 2020 when I ran against Ted Lieu.

Now the same man who vilifies anyone questioning election integrity is calling concerned Americans conspiracy theorists.
Let me break it down for you.

Los Angeles County has 5.9 million registered voters, more than 38 entire US states combined.

Yet this massive county had a mail ballot rejection rate of just 0.77 percent in 2024, lower than the statewide average of 0.93 percent.

How does the largest voting jurisdiction in America have a significantly lower signature rejection rate than much smaller counties?

California has no voter ID requirement for mail ballots.

Signature matching is the only safeguard, and in LA County that safeguard appears extremely weak.

Ballots can be counted for up to 30 plus days after Election Day.

Late counted mail ballots have consistently favored Democrats.

The man running LA County elections since 2008 is Dean Logan. In 2004, he oversaw a Governor’s race in Washington state decided by just 129 votes after multiple recounts, amid major controversy over overlooked mail ballots that flipped the outcome.

These questions are never answered. Anyone who asks them gets attacked.

It’s time to stop the name calling and demand real transparency.

We need a full forensic audit of LA County’s entire election system now.

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

The Wizard of Oz was the great American take down of "credentialism."

Fairy tales are truth tales.

[Anas Alhajji @anasalhajji]

👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

[Thom_ @Thomist_]

@Zigmanfreud @californiapost @hotmicsbilly How small is the “small amount of voter fraud” in your little world of eminent self-importance? 10%? 5%? 3%? Whatever it takes to swing an election outcome?

[Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew]

Well put.

This IS the process the Calif Legis -- with veto-proof super-majorities that let it do what it wants -- put in place.

They DO NOT CARE about the criticism from outside the state.

The entire system is designed to MAXIMIZE ballot accumulation, with the barest minimums of safeguards against vote fraud.

Those minimums only pay lip service to the threat of vote fraud.

The elongated period for the receipt of ballots introduces TIME that creates opportunity for mischief that would not be present if all votes had to be in on election day.

The resort to mailing millions of unrequested ballots to unverified addresses puts the means for vote fraud into the public domain.

But it all begins at the Calif DMV where merely checking a box registers the person named to vote with no ID or proof of citizenship required. That person can then get a ballot mailed to them and cast that vote without any interference from state or county election officials.

It is entirely on the "Honor System."

[Possum Reviews @ReviewsPossum]

Last night, I read the entirety of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. It's a novel told in the form of letters written by a demon to another demon instructing him on ways to manipulate his "patient" to do evil.

This one quote sounded familiar.

[Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew]

The Dem primary in 2027 is going to be:

Bernie Sanders
Kamala Harris
Gavin Newsom
Pete Buttigieg
John Ossoff
Josh Shapiro
JB Pritzker

Bernie will be really just a stalking horse for the DSA, and there will be 2-3 DSA candidates below that first tier. Maybe AOC, certainly Ro Khanna.

Bernie will be "in" to drive some of the others out because the "Bernie Bros" and DSA activists will line up behind him and starve the lesser candidates of money and attention.

Ossoff, Shapiro, and Pritzker will be sacrificed at the alter of Anti-Semitism which is almost a religion for a certain segment of the Bernie-Bro base, and stigmatizes them with a wider segment of the activists so they won't do well early, and will drop out.

Buttigieg is playing for the VP slot. He'll just hang around with money from both coasts.

It will come down to Sanders, Harris, and Newsom. But Sanders is there only to run out the riff-raff. His presence will be to boost the best performing DSA member in the group -- AOC, Khanna or someone else not yet on the radar.

Newsom will eventually drop out because he's straight white guy, and in a party dominated by single liberal women and minorities, he's not one of those.

It will come down to Harris and whichever DSA candidate Bernie throws his support to, with Harris being the "Joe Biden" for 2028.

It does not matter how bad she is as a candidate, in the nominating process the rationalization will be the 4 year separation from Biden's Presidency, the 104 days of 2024, the way she was treated as Biden's VP for 4 years, and the continuing animating idea in the Dem party that its past time for a minority female POTUS.

One thing that will be very different -- her campaign is learning right now from the first 6 months of Trump 2.0.

They will hit the campaign trail after the 2026 midterms with a full binder of thought-out and well-crafted policy statements. This term of the Supreme Court has given them a huge gift -- the decisions on the Voting Rights Act and its impact on redistricting.

She's going to ride that as a central theme.

[Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew]

I saw an analysis yesterday that the tree main “dumps” averages 38 Bass, 32 Ramen, and 19 Pratt.

That’s why the prediction markets moved to her.

If that margin holds with 400,000 ballots left, she will catch him.