Phil Haskett

Just so everybody's clear on where I stand: I want the country to be safe for vids of 1)cute furry animals 2)Young-uns' reactions 2 boomer music and 3)the new space revolution (SpaceX et al). I don't want the current obsession with politics. You can't always get what you want.

@Gormogons Oh I don't think they don't wonder at all. They are 100% sure they are comfortably in the majority, backed by constant reinforcement from 90+% of the media (except X), massive grift, and copious amounts of vote fraud and illegal gerrymandering.

GP I see that Maine's Democrats have rallied around a Nazi (or at least a dude who voluntarily got a Nazi tattoo) as their candidate for US Senator. Democrats may win, but then they'll wonder why they can't win on a national level currently.

@Sargon_of_Akkad Right near the top of your to-do list when British patriots regain power has to be a thorough house-cleaning of the BBC. Or should I say the Augean Stables-cleaning of the BBC?

Well, yes actually. The British public still have the power of selection in their hands, and parliament is still sovereign. When we win, we can actually do pretty much whatever we want, as long as the backbenchers will support it, which they will.

There are two and only two truly reasonable, non-partisan factors to consider for delimiting Congressional districts: 1. Population of U.S. citizens encompassed in the state's districts, and 2: The geographic compactness of the state's districts, taken as a whole, measured as the minimum of the ratio of the lengths of the boundaries of the state's districts to the area encompassed by the districts.

@johnkonrad @HungCao_VA The Blob is real.

Did this post trigger a staffer immune response so severe my phone kept ringing until 2:53 a.m.? Were there veiled threats to tank maritime legislation, strip NDAA provisions I care about, and slow-roll future maritime appointments for friends like @HungCao_VA? Is the Pope Catholic? I owed one staffer who reached out a serious favor, so I moved the post to subscribers only. They call it the Blob for a reason. She didn’t ask for it to be deleted. He definitely didn’t want it deleted. But the message from the powers that be was clear: leave it up, and there would be consequences. Who ordered the takedown? Nobody will say. I could have called out her former boss @SenatorCantwell until the cows came home and absolutely nothing would have happened. But name one mid-level staffer who’s built a fiefdom blocking literal life-saving appropriations at sea? All hell breaks loose, and rogue waves start crashing across the decks. Our elected officials don’t run the Senate. A handful of very powerful staffers do. And guess what? It’s not just the Senate. These staffers are embedded across the administration as political appointees too. That’s the price any new administration pays to get its appointees confirmed, federal judges included. That’s how the Blob reaches into all three branches and touches everything. The worst part? The best staffers get poached by K Street. What’s left behind is a small handful of true patriots (yes, some staffers are excellent), and a much larger group who either stayed behind because they love power or aren’t offered jobs anywhere else.

@Joelsstradamus To be fair the Twins had a good year or two back in the day.

If you’re talking “Denver fans” it’s actually 7-0 keep up Avs 3, Wild 0 Broncos 3, Vikings 0 Nuggets 1, Wolves 0

@DaddyWarpig Will there be sharks? There's got to be sharks.

I’m sure this movie is stupid. But it just might be stupid enough to be entertaining. AMERICA CAN SHOULD MUST AND WILL BLOW UP THE MOON > A new moon caught in Earth's gravitational pull results in an Ice Age. Scientists and the military must destroy the second moon before it's too late.

@JesseKellyDC @braxton_mccoy It's the bees. IT'S THE BEES!!!

I love that there are multiple reports of Scott Bessent getting in fistfights with various Trump cabinet people. We’ve got a gay finance genius in the White House just throwing hands with anyone who steps out of line. It kills me.

@JulieCFrost Do you suppose Trump floats these things specifically to get the Bulwarkies and their ilk into a tizzy?

Oh look more anonymous sources. 🥱

@CraigR3521 THE BEES!

Comments were locked before I could add this one:

Someone posted the photo of the bee on Trump’s hand in a beekeeping group, and the TDS ran wild, to the point where the OP turned off commenting. I did manage to slip this one in though:

@esrtweet I did not have ESR vigorously backstopping Kratman on China on today's bingo card. X is occasionally glorious.

Tom didn't explain his second assertion, but it's important so I'm going to do it. China is in the worst strategic position of any great power in history because it is critically dependent on resources it has to import, and it doesn't have control of the sea lanes over which it imports them. China is neither food nor energy self-sufficient. It needs to import pork from the United States, grain from Africa, coal from Australia, and oil from the Middle East to keep its population fed and its factories running. Naval blockades at about three critical chokepoints (Hormuz, Malacca, Sunda) would cripple the Chinese economy within months, possibly within weeks. China does not have the blue-water navy required to contrast control of those chokepoints. The moment any first-rate naval power or even a second-rate like India decides China needs to be stopped, it's pretty much game over. As a completely separate issue thanks to the one-child policy, Chinese population probably peaked in 2006 and has been declining ever since. Every year in the foreseeable future they will have fewer military-age males than they do now. Most of those males are only sons; their deaths would wipe out entire family lines, giving the Chinese people an extremely low tolerance for war casualties. Then there's the glass jaw. The Three Gorges Dam. Which is already in some peril even without a war - you can compare photographs over time and see that it's sagging. If anyone gets annoyed enough to pop that dam thing with a bunker-buster or a pony nuke, the resulting floods will kill millions and wipe out the strip of central China that is by far the country's most industrially and agriculturally productive region. The Chinese haven't fought a war since 1971. They lost. Against Vietnam. The institutional knowledge that could potentially fit their army for doing anything more ambitious than suppressing regional warlordism does not exist. I could go on. But I think I've made Tom's statements sufficiently understandable already.

Ben Sasse finds his level.

@iowahawkblog @jarvis_best Usage: A threggening crybully.

We need a word for simultaneously begging and threatening, and I’d like to nominate “threggening”

@HawkEmDownChris The University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople

Without googling, can you name a fictional college?

@HawkEmDownChris Faber College The University of Wollamaloo The University of Okoboji Huxley College

@carterfogarty24 @ComradeArthur @Alden_Gonzalez @JeffPassan I still think "antilock braking system" when first seeing "ABS."

@Alden_Gonzalez @JeffPassan I disagree. ABS should be allowed except for the final strike of an at bat in 9th inning tie games. Any other time is fine

This moment in St. Louis yesterday is precisely what the ABS challenge system was meant for — a strikeout on what was clearly a ball, overturned, and then the game-winning home run.

In 1969, William Shatner’s career ended on national television. Not metaphorically. Not slowly. It stopped abruptly, with a network decision and a canceled time slot. NBC canceled Star Trek after three seasons of modest ratings. Executives who had never fully understood the show—and who had nearly ended it earlier before a fan campaign saved it, finally pulled the plug. The Enterprise’s mission ended early. And William Shatner, who had played Captain James T. Kirk with intensity and unforgettable pauses, suddenly had no role left. He was thirty-eight. Divorced. Financially struggling. And facing an industry that had little interest in an actor tied to a canceled sci-fi show many dismissed as a fad. Shatner found himself living out of a camper, traveling between small theater jobs that paid minimal wages. The man who once commanded a starship was now performing in regional productions, hoping audiences would show up. This was not the plan. Most actors would have left the industry and found stability elsewhere. Shatner didn’t. He doubled down. In the early 1970s, something unusual began. Fans of Star Trek started gathering - small conventions in hotel ballrooms, dismissed by mainstream culture as niche and strange. The industry mocked them. “Trekkies,” they were called. Most actors avoided these events. Shatner didn’t. He met fans. Signed autographs. Answered questions. Showed up when others wouldn’t. Because while others saw failure, he saw something different. Star Trek wasn’t gone. It was evolving. The show thrived in syndication. Viewers rewatched episodes, shared recordings, built communities, and kept the story alive. The audience was growing. By the mid-1970s, Star Trek had become something larger than television - a cultural force driven by its fans. And Shatner, who stayed connected, became its living symbol. Hollywood had overlooked it. The audience had not. In 1979, Paramount Pictures revived Star Trek as a feature film. Shatner returned and not as a fading actor, but as someone the audience had kept alive. The film succeeded because the fans showed up. They had waited. They had believed. And so did he. Years later, Shatner admitted something revealing: At first, he didn’t understand the fans. “I thought they were obsessed,” he said. Then he realized that they were sustaining him. They kept the character alive. The story alive. His career alive. They weren’t obsessed. They were committed. Shatner learned from them. He learned respect for audience passion. He learned reinvention. He adapted. He starred in T.J. Hooker. He took on new roles. He embraced self-awareness. He appeared in commercials that leaned into his persona, recorded music, and kept working. Then came Boston Legal. At seventy-three, he played Denny Crane, a role that blended humor and vulnerability, and won two Primetime Emmy Awards. The same style once mocked was now celebrated. He had never stopped evolving. And then - something unexpected. At ninety, Shatner went to space. On October 13, 2021, he flew aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. The actor who once imagined space travel finally experienced it. He returned visibly moved, reflecting on Earth’s fragility, beauty, and significance. It completed a journey few could imagine. From struggling actor to cultural icon. From canceled show to lasting legacy. From fiction to reality. William Shatner didn’t just play Captain Kirk. He embodied the idea: exploration, persistence, and reinvention. He entered spaces others avoided - fan conventions, unconventional roles, unfamiliar paths, and turned them into opportunities. He proved that failure isn’t permanent, that audiences matter, and that reinvention is always possible. The fans once dismissed as outsiders were right. The story mattered. The vision mattered. And William Shatner learned to see it.They didn’t just preserve nostalgia. They preserved possibility. They kept something alive... and in doing so, they kept him alive too. That’s the story. Not just success - but understanding. Not just survival - but transformation. William Shatner played Captain Kirk for only three seasons. But he spent decades living the message: Keep moving forward. Keep adapting. Keep exploring. The mission continues.

This is also me.

@double_fox7 @grey4626 Nobody wants Go Time.

@filbertwrites @grey4626 Shoot how many communists?

The Spanish Civil War wasn’t a polite disagreement over policy. It was the raw, screaming eruption of what happens when one side decides the other is an existential threat to be exterminated, and the other side...paralyzed by decorum, institutional inertia, and a suicidal faith in “norms”...lets it happen. From 1936 to 1939, Spain tore itself apart in a furnace of ideology: anarchists, communists, and radical Republicans on one end, Nationalists, monarchists, and the Catholic right on the other. Cities burned. Priests were dragged from altars and shot. Guernica was leveled not as collateral but as a message. Foreign powers...Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin...poured in weapons and ideology while the so-called “democratic” left in the West wrung its hands and romanticized the slaughter. When it ended, half a million were dead and Franco’s boot came down hard. History’s verdict? The side that understood power won. The side that treated politics like a debating society got corpses. And here we are in 2026 America, watching the same script play out in slow motion, except the Republicans...those self-proclaimed guardians of the Republic...are auditioning for the role of the spineless moderates who got marched to the wall in Barcelona. The left has already declared total war: cultural, institutional, legal, and psychological. They own the universities that breed the cadres, the media that shapes the narrative, the bureaucracies that weaponize “justice,” the tech overlords who censor dissent, and the streets where Antifa cosplayers rehearse their revolutionary wet dreams. They don’t debate; they delegitimize. They don’t disagree; they pathologize you as a threat to “democracy” itself. They’ve studied Alinsky, Gramsci, and Mao. They understand the friend-enemy distinction Carl Schmitt laid bare: politics is not about compromise...it’s about who gets to define the enemy and crush him. The psychology here is textbook cowardice wrapped in virtue. Republicans crave the approval of the very institutions that despise them. They want to be seen as the “adults in the room,” the reasonable ones, the ones who still believe in “bipartisanship” while the other side is loading magazines. It’s a death cult of respectability. They fear being called “extremist” more than they fear the extinction of the country that elected them. So they pass toothless resolutions. They hold hearings that go nowhere. They fund the very agencies that spy on their voters. They negotiate with people who view negotiation as surrender. They are not serious. They are not warriors. They are the eunuchs guarding the harem while the barbarians scale the walls. Thomas Hobbes warned that without a sovereign willing to enforce order, life reverts to the war of all against all. The left gets this instinctively. They have the will. They have the venom. They have the ferocity. Republicans have press releases. The Spanish Republicans of 1936 didn’t lose because their ideas were weaker; they lost because they fragmented while the Nationalists consolidated will and force. Sound familiar? This is not politics. This is prelude. We are not “divided.” We are at the fault line of incompatible civilizations...one that reveres the individual, the family, the West’s hard-won inheritance; the other that worships the collective, the state, and the endless revenge of the resentful. The left is not confused. It is coherent in its hatred. The Republicans’ failure is not tactical; it is ontological. History is not a bedtime story. It is a butcher’s ledger. Spain proved that when one side goes for the throat and the other offers its neck, the throat wins. If the American right keeps electing therapists in suits instead of lions, we will get our own Guernica...only this time the bombs will be lawfare, financial ruin, and cultural erasure, until the streets run red because no one had the spine to stop it earlier. Wake the fuck up. 💀🗡️⚖️

My updated cartoon is unfortunately still relevant.