There's no exit from the road we are on
A judge confirmed at fifty-five can't borrow the naivety of the twenty-four-year-old who first got noticed. Neither, really, can anyone else.
There's no exit from the road we are on
Switch electoral systems, restore the Founders' actual vision, or take the party back from the inside. All three get tried on for size in this piece. None of them fit, and the reasons are worth understanding in detail rather than taking on faith.
Political Musing
Fourteen months ago I argued the "right way" barely exists. Since then they fired a quarter of the immigration judges, deleted legal status for a million people who followed every rule, and still won't touch an employer.
Political Musing
Sarah Longwell wants the Chamber of Commerce wing back at the center of the GOP. The physics says the room that made that possible doesn't exist anymore, and there's no path back to it.
recap
Posts and notes from the week of September 5, though September 12, 2026
This Fucking Guy
NASA's planetary defense chief on Nathan Myhrvold: "He's a very smart man, but that doesn't make him an expert in everything." That's the whole piece, honestly.
House Rules
Roughly 75 million Americans live under a body that taxes, regulates, fines, and can take their house. It isn't in the Constitution, and neither party will touch it.
The Long Arc, a journey of political weight
Empires get remembered with two clean dates, a start and a finish. The actual record refuses to hold still at either one.
Posts from the week of August 29th through September 4th.
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Cricket didn't just teach the empire's children what to value. It sorted them by how well they performed having learned it, and the sorting outlasted the empire that built it.
Forty-five years of paper trail, and exactly one time he found the discretion to swing the other way.
The English aristocracy spent 800 years running an arms race against everyone else's money. This is a tour of every weapon they built.
My stepfather's last property tax bill was $785. On a house we sold for $1.8 million. He did nothing wrong, and neither did I, and that's the problem with letting people like us decide.
Buchanan proved the grievance was real. Limbaugh proved it had its own infrastructure. The Tea Party proved it could be weaponized. National Review and the Kochs never saw any of it coming — because they were never actually in control.
The week of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Posting[1]. I started the week with a review of the 13 or so months after I moved away from Substack. It was a reflective review, but as a prominent reader told me, I should stop looking at
Recurring instability turns out to be more efficient than defunding. A real cut would have produced hearings. This produced a quiet, rational, distributed exodus that never made the news.
One network built him a branded show and killed it with a one-line memo. Another platformed him for five years and went silent the moment his story got inconvenient. Neither one got fooled.
Democratic AGs sued over the NIH terminations and got $2.1 billion restored to their states. Republican AGs mostly didn't sue. Their states got back $62 million. Same terminations. Different choices.
My introduction to the rich tapestry of the Blues was from my step father, and this movie was a big part of it.
Russell Vought didn't stumble into defunding the government he now runs. He's been arguing for this exact power since 2019, got caught once, and came back with better lawyers.
Been a while, but Joanna Connor deserves the call out. I'll be damned if she doesn't look like she's having a blast.
