Told her about Hidden Figures during the scenes with the mathematicians at Mission Control and they’re all white men

Watched Apollo 13 with my oldest and when the German scientist came on screen I stopped the movie to tell her about Operation Paperclip. If you know me or my work you know I’ve been waiting for this moment since I took her home from the hospital

The result has been something like an inverse caricature of Republican complaints about diversity, equity, and inclusion, a system in which the incompetent rise not because of their abilities but because of their sycophancy. Authoritarian regimes behave as the Trump administration is behaving—optimizing for political loyalty rather than competence. Merit, in short, has little to do with it. Hegseth is a prime example. Deeply unqualified for the job and convinced that brutality provides an easy path to victory, he has led the United States to the verge of a strategic defeat with a weaker adversary in Iran. The current cease-fire leaves Iran with a more hard-line government than before, one in total control of a shipping lane crucial to the world economy. The Islamic Republic is arguably in a stronger position today than it was when the war started, and probably in a stronger position than it was before Trump, in his first term, scrapped the Obama-era nuclear deal. On Sunday, Trump posted on his social network a refrain that he and his toadies seem to think is insightful: “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World!” This archaic social Darwinism is the ideological mortar of the Trump project. It fuses Hegseth’s disdain for diversity in the military’s senior leadership and valorization of brutality with the administration’s attack on birthright citizenship and its deployment of federal agents to occupy American cities. It is a worldview that would assume an easy victory against a country like Iran, especially with America’s new, “unwoke” military. Bigotry isn’t just inefficient, as the U.S. military discovered in the 1940s. It also makes you stupid.

Wrote about how Hegseth’s effort to resegregate the upper ranks of the US military ties into the larger MAGA project to restore hierarchies of race and gender: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Do you seriously think the world is only just now convinced the U.S. is an amoral threat to other nations?

This is a roster of names of the many, many people George Washington owned.

Iran Tightens Its Grip on Hormuz Despite Cease-Fire President Trump demanded opening the strait. Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard is limiting ship traffic and charging tolls

The long-term Iranian plan? Kill the petrodollar. “Iran is requiring ships to work out toll arrangements ahead of time and then pay the fees in cryptocurrency or Chinese yuan, mediators and shipbrokers said.”

Thank god no one besides Mark Zuckerberg and the NSA can hear the weird stuff I say to myself when I’m home alone

Read Elia’s thread. There is no ceasefire in Lebanon. There never has been a ceasefire in Lebanon, for now years

Fascist Nuke Fears, Moneyballing Nuclear War, and Risk Factors of Armageddon We should be worried about either the US or Israel using nukes against Iran.

"The same ideological blind spot in Western analysis that accommodates a genocide in Gaza would accommodate either the US or Israel busting the nuclear taboo." @vanjackson.bsky.social is surely right about this, and also reminds us that luck saved us from nuclear war with North Korea in 2017-8.

Jews Demand: Release Salah Sarsour The Trump regime using antisemitism as a smokescreen to crush our civil liberties and divert attention and resources away from real antisemitism

Join Jews across the country to demand that Salah Sarsour be released from custody and returned to his family immediately with his green card intact. Learn more and add your name:

The Many Fathers of The Murder of Iran As Trump threatens that "a whole civilization will die tonight," remember that he didn't get here by himself

This piece by @attackerman.bsky.social is one of the most emotional I have read coming from him. It’s the moment where the rantings of a mad man become fear paralysis, where we stand on the cliff edge of nuclear war one more time. It didn’t work during the Cold War, is even less unforeseeable now

The Many Fathers of The Murder of Iran As Trump threatens that "a whole civilization will die tonight," remember that he didn't get here by himself

As always, @attackerman.bsky.social is a must read:
"This mass murder will not be [Trump's] alone. There is an entire political, security and media apparatus that brought us to this point." www.forever-wars.com/the-many-fat...

The Many Fathers of The Murder of Iran As Trump threatens that "a whole civilization will die tonight," remember that he didn't get here by himself

I want to look back on this piece tonight as a hysterical overreaction. Because that will mean the peoples and the cultures of Iran will have survived.

I suppose, sure. I’m thinking about who outside the US chain of command might have the power to obstruct this and I landed on Erdogan, who for better or for worse Trump listens to.

What will Erdogan do? The nuclear warheads nearest to Iran are stored at Incirlik.

“A whole civilization will die tonight” is the most vile thing a US president has ever said, certainly during the post-1945 era when they’ve had the power to kill civilizations with the dropping of a bomb. I’m staring into the darkness. May this not be one of the most fateful days in human history.

Absolutely egregious paraphrase

I appreciate that, but my whole career I’ve had such psychopaths seeking to use such trivial mistakes to four-move-checkmate me out of covering this stuff; plus even trivial mistakes bother me when I make them, so

That should of course been spelled “ordnance”

A reliable metric for a losing war: notice how often a combatant describes inputs (ordinance dropped, resources committed, duration of operation) as a substitute for outputs (effects a military operation is intending to produce).

Xi Jinping Has A Chance To Do The Funniest Thing Right Now He could stop the Iran War. And in the process, rebalance the world's great-power politics

Oh, there’s a way, but the US isn’t going to like it (and the Chinese may not want to do it):

The Next Target for the U.S. and Israel Is Iran’s Economy The two allies have been steadily stepping up attacks on Iranian infrastructure and are planning to hit energy facilities.

You have to get to the sixth paragraph of this story before you read the disgracefully-phrased sentence: “Attacking civilian infrastructure risks violating international law”

The best opening sequence in comics history in issue #1. An exquisite hero A-plot in the second arc, where Curtis has a nervous breakdown from the stress of the first arc.

I wrote this *before* the war: how we should expect the aggression against Iran to resemble the Israeli destruction of civilian infrastructure of Gaza, a crucial component of the genocide.

For more on this:

The death toll from the USAID cuts is already in the hundreds of thousands

Musk, Trump, and the Supreme Court have already killed over half a million children

You may not know this but the Washington Post Editorial Board surely does

Iran, knowing ball, pays attention to interservice shit talking.

That is a response to seeing it compiled together, the weight of it all, through a document dump pried out of the FBI’s archives. It’s the opposite of surprise. It’s recognition

“OH ArE yOu sURprIsED by tHaT?” No, I’ve been doing this sort of reporting for 25 years. What I’m telling you is that I’m struck by the ease and banality of the ecosystem of overbroad surveillance, the way it becomes a reflex for those carrying out the process.

I’ll have more to say about this next year but if you want to drive yourself insane, win a FOIA lawsuit vs the FBI & acquire 100s of pages of surveillance logs. Then read the agents record the license plate #s of people they KNOW aren’t connected to the surveillance target: solicitors, customers etc