John Stallings

@timurkuran We have plenty of lefties on X. Yglessias, Paul Graham, many others, the people went to BlueSky are not missed and would not be listened to anyway. Interestingly I don't follow most of those "right wing" accounts either.

In leaving Twitter/X for essentially all-blue platforms like Bluesky, progressive leftists abdicated their capacity to influence middle-of-the-road constituencies. For the luxury of self-segregation from non-progressive views, they sabotaged their own political causes.

@business @Matthew_Winkler @opinion Bloomberg can just lie like this?

Gavin Newsom's stewardship of California's economy has been so stellar that even Elon Musk admits he can't quit the Golden State, says @Matthew_Winkler (via @opinion) bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

@ggreenwald Ask yourself what a 79 year old Trump needs with more money or power? That's not what he is about.

You won't hear a better 55-second description of MAGA and Trump than this: in terms of the perspective of any minimally honest MAGA supporter:

@phl43 Might explain Trump's Easter Day tirade.

The situation with crude supplies right now is a bit like when you look at the stars and you actually see them not as they currently are but as they were thousands of years ago because of how much time it takes for the light to reach you.

@HarmeetKDhillon I'm a huge Trump fan but this post is actually concerning.

Good thing President Trump has better taste in cabinet members!

@policytensor Iran is about religion. A disgusting religion, Islam. They must be killed, individually, one and all. Do not compare them to NK. Category error.

Iran won’t end like North Korea. NK you can put in a box. Iran will control Hormuz and run the gulf. Get your heads out of your asses.

For 8 years after Charlottesville, hosts on CNN played video of Trump's comments from that day, cut the video right before Trump condemned white supremacy, and then told their audiences that Trump never condemned white supremacy. Lemon, Tapper, Cooper, Acosta, and many others. Liars who deserved to be shamed.

@rubiconjay @AlpacaAurelius @ken_tx4598 Damned good point.

@AlpacaAurelius @ken_tx4598

people assume that every time you eat steak you're killing a cow.... but even if you ate 1lb of steak every single day, you wouldn't even kill one whole cow... one cow produces over 500 lbs of meat...and it does this from GRASS which is inedible to humans... cows are basically divine machines that convert inedible food into steak, milk, leather and so much more. yet people continue to say "cow farts are destroying the planet" the cow is the most sustainable and vegan thing you can eat God bless the cow

@DeepDishEnjoyer Have lived in NoVa in 20 years, hated living there because of the traffic, but definitely miss eating at Moby Dick. Never again have I found good Persian food, not in California or even Texas.

okay this is still good but my moby dick (no put intended) for kebab chenjeh is circa 2004 Maryland restaurant "Moby Dick" (in Kentlands.) Even the chain that it is now is still good but back then it was S tier Persian food

@phl43 I just knew Philippe was a Cat Turd fan!

Everybody thinks Catturd is a retard, but what if he were secretly a restrainer, who is playing 4D chess by convincing Trump's fans to support a full and immediate withdrawal of the US from Europe, thereby destroying its ability to project power in the Middle East in one fell swoop and making it impossible for Americans to be drawn into stupid wars over there in the future?

@DavoustBaldPate @StealthQE4 @2ndSmartest Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan.

@StealthQE4 @2ndSmartest Oh wow. Wait until you find out what we did to Dresden. Or Tokyo. Or Hiroshima. Or Pyongyang.

Morally I have a severe problem with this. I don’t think we are the “good guys” anymore. We’ve gone full rogue. The events I’m watching are things that I never thought I’d see us ever do to anyone. It’s really disturbing

@StealthQE4 Did you sleep the past 50 years?

The "growth" was from foreigners being brought in, the money went to them. It's all a patronage scheme for anyone that isn't American.

@ericshayhoward @BrandonStraka Also no examples LOL, this guy is going to get ratioed. :) And Biden did respect checks and balances?

@BrandonStraka Regardless of his inability to articulate what he means, Trump has said things that suggest that he doesn’t respect the checks and balances built into the system. This is what they mean.

Lib: "Trump acts like a king ." Interviewer: "Name 1 thing that makes you think that he acts like a king." Lib: "There are a million of them." Interviewer: "Just name 1 or 2" Lib: "Uhh.. I can't think of none right now."

@DrJStrategy How do we protect billion dollar ships from $10,000 drones?

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

Why are we in Germany to begin with? Historic reasons that are long gone. I have no ill will toward Germany in fact Germany was once a bastion of Western Civilization, not to mention bad ass (fought the entire globe twice) but they are no longer the problem of the US, they are destroying themselves.

AfD leader calls for ending US troops in Germany, and the party immediately jumps in the polls. A new poll today puts them in the lead

@LangmanVince They have a point about the dress code though. Whites and Asians don't exactly dress moderately, that's not a thing anymore.

The fatigue is real! That's why they didn't let you in!

@ScottLoBaido At least someone is having fun tonight. 🫡

Eh hem.

@RonResnick @Osint613 You are not a dumb guy. Surprising that you would ask this.

@Osint613 Did Jamie Dimon go to national security policy school over the weekend? Why in the world does anyone care about the personal, random opinions of a banker on matters of national security?

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on the Iran conflict: "I would step back a little when you say it’s a war of choice. There was no imminent threat? They’ve been killing people around the world for 45-plus years. They funded Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, they have terrorist cells here. They were about to get ballistic missiles that can go almost 3,000 miles. They never gave up nuclear. I’m praying it ends well." - Axios