«Vierziger wasn’t wearing body armor; he’d claimed it would interfere with his driving. Now he reached left-handed into one of his tunic’s front bellows pockets and drew out a red-banded grenade that he had no business carrying.
He struck the safety cap off against the side of the building with casual ease. Malaveda had seen troopers trying to arm a grenade that way, proving how macho they were. He’d never seen anybody succeed so perfectly, and with such little concern, as Vierziger did now.»

David Drake, Hammer’s Slammers vol. 3, The Sharp End

How do you put this in a (video) episode of something?

(I keep thinking how this stuff would be so good on Netflix or Amazon.)

Al.com is teh bomb.

«Britt’s problem is an old one in Alabama politics — she couldn’t be genuine and win. So she chose to be fake.

There might be a simple explanation for Britt’s odd delivery Thursday night: Perhaps she couldn’t believe what she was saying either.

And like so many Alabama politicians before her, she left us asking …

Was she ever real?»

https://www.al.com/news/2024/03/whitmire-is-katie-britt-for-real.html

https://www.justsecurity.org/92714/american-autocracy-threat-tracker/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#post-92714-_y4a3s8vnsqyb

Blech. Really unpleasant reading (and I have given up, at least temporarily), but it’s all here, in one concentrated, smoking lump of evil.

https://youtu.be/QKGbguoildA?si=veq-cz8GKCRpFgR-

https://www.businessinsider.com/job-applications-hiring-ai-bots-spam-resume-cover-letter-2024-3

Hmm, is this our future?

«Troves of internal documents and analyses have over the past decade established that Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating as far back as the 1970s, but forcefully and successfully worked to sow doubt about the climate crisis and stymie action to clamp down on fossil fuel usage. The revelations have inspired litigation against Exxon across the US.»

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures

Yes, and they should pay. BUT. For decades (generations, even) the US has resisted increasingly stringent CAFE* standards. As an electorate. This country, on the whole, has continued to buy gas-guzzling vehicles. This is a collective decision. We have known this for generations and not acted on it. Like. Seriously. It’s not like we didn’t know.

(I own one such vehicle myself, a 2022 Subaru Outback. A premium on the vehicle, plus appropriate taxes to raise the price of gas might have affected my car-purchase decision, but if I had still chosen to pay the premium, that would have been my choice.)

*Look it up.

«classic conservative posture of just, like, a person who is doing okay and is kinda selfish and who thinks that progressive idealists might be bad news.»

https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-we-got-here-ce8

“Kinda selfish.” I like that characterization.

«Yet a sense that Trump’s win was somehow an indictment of Obama for not being sufficiently progressive — rather than an indictment of Romney for being too far-right on retirement programs — has hung like a weird fog of misperception over Democrats’ interpretations of Trump-era politics.»

I wonder how much of that “weird fog” traces back to the miasma of social media.

Yglesias is irritating a lot of the time, but that was a good article.

«Associate Justice Anil Singh, however, lifted a ban on Trump’s ability to obtain loans from a New York bank, which could allow him to access the equity in his assets to back the full bond amount.»

Ok, who’s going to loan him money now?

🍿

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/28/politics/donald-trump-appeals-court-new-york/index.html

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article285729116.html

Don’t know if this is paywalled or not.

Local Democratic activist/politician:

«I’d love to see Satana take on Bishop head-to-head – standing strong as a queer, black, Hamlet, NC, to Princeton to Duke-educated, woman in the face of his stupid bigotry. Further, we need Satana’s fire to be part of our overall slate’s appeal to the Democratic electorate. Simply put, I do not believe we can win North Carolina with the top of the ticket dominated by white moderates.»

https://www.graigmeyer.com/2024/02/my-democratic-primary-endorsements/

(Emphasis his.)

I wouldn’t cry if we nominated Jeff Jackson, instead, though.