Smith, bless him, only is worth reading if you’re already so deep into the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume, and Common Sense Realism that you know what he’s in dialogue with; I’m certain that Musk has at best encountered a copy an interior designer put on a bookshelf as part of his Zoom background.

I think if you’re gonna lament the loss of “Huguenot pubs” you should be legally-bound to go all the way and openly blame a Jesuit conspiracy as being behind it all.

That’s the core difference between a political clan and nepotism, the willingness to work your way up from the political factory floor.

These would and should, in a just legal landscape, be considered self-defeating pardons; the President cannot conspire to violate the laws in contravention of his Constitutional obligations and then pardon those complicit in his own transgressions.

Yeah, Conkling’s feud with Garfield was mostly over patronage for the Albany machine, plus Garfield supporting Blaine, who was Conkling’s lifelong nemesis and rival.

Mfer said “secuirty agent.”

Wasn’t there some bit early on about Mulder having cultivated some key supporters in Congress, so (subtextually) he was basically too much of a political headache to can, as long as he stayed in his basement?

It’s basically the finest season of X-Files ever filmed and the best artistic commentary on generative AI (and art in the time of social media more generally) yet.

Once again, we see that what people really want are the midcentury US vibes of a middle-income country becoming a high-income country, only with the pre-existing material conditions of a high-income country.

(This being Spirit, when it comes to lease and loan default notices, “Why not both?” is a totally reasonable answer.)

Wasn’t it AerCap that had the lease dispute? I thought the Pratt issue was P&W MRO ops getting backed up with AOGs because of GTF mfg defects, which, given Spirit’s, uh, /lax/ attention to MRO in general, probably existentially screwed up their scheduling.

So, “cracking like dogs” is interesting, because it feels like phonemic paraphasia; “cracking like eggs” is the correct idiom, of course, but he substituted an incorrect but phonologically-similar word. Common symptom of linguistic processing disorders comorbid with progressive neurodegeneration.