domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
16m ago
The sentiment you describe reminds me of the Talleyrand quote:
He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life. This is the century that has shaped all the conquering arms against this elusive adversary called boredom. Love, Poetry, Music, Theatre, Painting, Architecture, Court, Salons, Parks and Gardens, Gastronomy, Letters, Arts, Science, all contributed to the satisfaction of physical appetites, intellectual and even moral refinement of all pleasures, all the elegance and all the pleasures. The existence was so well filled that if the seventeenth century was the Great Age of glories, the eighteenth was that of indigestion.
DelendaEst
22m ago
But I don't think PTB blackbag ops are the real threat, I think it is culture warriors who have been convinced that the other side winning is Armageddon and they have to Do Something! Killing Trump would be a big win for those people, but he has massive SS protection at all times, and if the outcome is just Trumps VP takes office its not as big a difference maker as it could be. But the Supremes are much softer targets and would have a big effect if you could kill a coupe and Biden replaces them with lefties. Normally you'd think that Dems would actually balk at taking advantage of such a situation as that would be seen as endorsing assassins, but Dems also think several seats were stolen in one way or another, and Thomas while not a stolen seat is uniquely vile.
Skibboleth
23m ago
the powers-that-be
There should be a requirement that if you're going to use vague and allusive terms that you define those terms so people can know who you're talking about. Don't just say 'elites' or 'the powers-that-be'. What specific people/organizations/institutions do you mean?
fishtwanger
32m ago
This is probably not what you want, but "Remnants of the Precursors" is a MoO1 adaptation with a number of flavor-retaining enhancements. I think the largest galaxy I ever played for a while was something like 50,000 stars and 500 empires, but it's possible to go up to over 500,000 stars. The game interface can be made to work crudely at that scale (but it's open source and allows mods), and at some point your machine may grind to a halt between turns, once there are enough large empires. But it was a fascinating experience.
It felt like I was an orchestra conductor, shifting the pressure and direction of expansion. And it was very much in keeping with the grabby aliens theory: my empire was surrounded by an ever-expanding wave of scouts, followed by a wave of colony ships and guard fleets, and here and there actual battle fleets, all pulsing out from factory worlds on the rim of the developed core, with dozens of turns before they get close enough to the front to even be pointed at an enemy. (The deep core of my empire being too far away, and thus devoted to research and taxation.) I no longer cared about individual ships, it was more about how best to allocate the ones that had arrived at the frontline waypoints this year. When a new serious threat emerged, I had to do some long term balancing, figuring out what technologies and resource base they had, whether my fleets could defeat it in sufficient numbers or if I'd need a new design, which of my existing ship designs could afford to be scrapped, whether all my other ongoing conflicts could stand the loss of a class of ship, and so forth.
Eventually, as I expanded along the spiral arm of a galaxy and into the body and reached the dense core, I found that I was too late. Instead of being 1-2 orders of magnitude more powerful than the empires I'd been encountering, a Meklar empire had taken over the core and had expanded so much that, although I still had a slight tech lead (Psilon pride), my size graphs were indistinguishable from 0. Alas, then the game started taking too long between turns on my 10-year-old laptop. But it's been a number of years, and the game engine has improved substantially since then.
ulyssessword
33m ago
the perfect level of trashy dumb progression fantasy
I'll recommend Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster’s Power. It thoroughly earns its 3.5 star rating with its characterization, plot, and prose, but man was it fun.
A few underappreciated positives of stories I'm reading (that wouldn't generally make it into other reviews):
The Calamitous Bob: The world and everything in it is as serious as reality, which makes it an excellent straight man. For example, the first group the main character runs into doesn't have a "V" phoneme in their language, so she becomes known as "Bob". Also, you know the the trope where you can tame a cute animal by acting nonthreatening and giving it food? And animal-like people (eg. cat-people, lizard-people, bird-people)? Well,
Markets and Multiverses: Death isn't final, so the stakes are higher. If the protagonists got into an unwinnable fight in any other story, I'd know they would survive (because otherwise the story ends). However, the worst-case scenario of having to reincarnate doesn't end the story, so it's a possibility: they lost plot-armor in exact proportion to their immortality.
Player Manager: It's set very much in present day London. In-story, it's mid-April 2024, and the earlier chapters included the Queen's death and its effects on English sports. It lends a certain amount of grounding to the story.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
40m ago
Which one is the fraud case? Hard to search.
Yes, I’ve been keeping up with the unredactions. Mostly to argue with people in the other subthread. I swear, when I started reading I didn’t look like such a partisan hack!
A few of the claims are very defensible. Then they’re used to argue something much more elaborate (and, of course, more favorable to Trump). Nothing about the document reordering changes the facts of the warrant or the charges. Translating “we acknowledge inconsistency with what we previously understood and represented to the Court” as “we are lying liars who got caught” is disingenuous.
That conclusion is propped up by thinner evidence. There’s a paragraph suggesting NARA gave Trump boxes at one point? That must mean they were the classified documents; it’s all a setup! News outlets ran with a misleading FBI photo? Psyop! Any time Politico or CNN says something uncharitable? Proof of the deep-seated conspiracy. Except when the judge postpones; clearly she’s the only rational, unbiased individual in this whole mess.
The biggest outlier is the claim about early DoJ/NARA collaboration, which is most likely to prove a political but-for. It’s also getting far less attention from Trump partisans. Is that because they aren’t sure about the timeline? Because they understand the difference between correlation and causation? Because they already assume the political motive is the only way? I don’t know. That’s the issue I’ll be following most closely.
you-get-an-upvote
Hyperbole is bad
49m ago
I've pushed back against /r/neoliberal for being biased against conservatives and pushed back here against people here for being biased against liberals.
bolido_sentimental
50m ago
I have a few days off coming up, during which I'm not working, but also not traveling as I have other scheduled travel coming up.
What do you like to do when you have a few days off like that?
MiddleAgedMan
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
54m ago
I am old and out of touch, so take this with the proper skepticism. Clearly you need to just not ask her out. If you run into her, get your hug, have a pleasant conversation, and let that be the end of it. Presumably she has your number etc.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me three times, I won't get fooled again. (/bush2)
That's a hard question, especially without specifying the number of people in the set called "powers-that-be". I like the term because it is clear that I am not pretending to know exactly who is in the set.
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