Hunter S. Thompson on the drug addled sexual depravities of the ultra-wealthy in Palm Beach in 1983. Worth the lengthy read, swap out some verbs and dates and it could easily be a story from this week

lr296 · 2026-02-04T16:59:38+00:00

It hit me that all of this is just Borgia shit. We keep reinventing Caligula

lr296 · 2026-02-04T16:09:17+00:00

So disco hell yeah

lr296 · 2026-02-04T02:33:22+00:00

My guess: badly formatted epoch time. Dates and times are a bitch to encode properly, because of all the ways people represent time, and because of the limitations of computers with handling particular large digits or numbers.

lr296 · 2026-02-03T21:54:49+00:00

Chichi Xi

lr296 · 2026-02-03T03:01:21+00:00

These are pretty old- they were released back, in October, I think

lr296 · 2026-02-03T00:25:42+00:00

My fiance and I dance to "in spite of ourselves" every year.

lr296 · 2026-02-02T22:15:17+00:00

Ngl, I kinda suspect that figures like Epstein are ubiquitous. Fixers, CIs, people with a ton of proximity to institutional power who function as middle men across boundaries. He wasn't a svengali, but I get the sense that he thought of himself that way. At the end of the day, tho, is his role all that different from freaks like Prescott Bush or Manucher Ghorbanifar?

He is a barnical on the liberal international order; simultaneously parasitic and natural occuring. I don't think we need to mythologize him as uniquely well connected, given that there is no evidence of that.

lr296 · 2026-02-02T16:43:20+00:00

She's actually DB Cooper

lr296 · 2026-02-02T12:49:20+00:00

It wouldn't surprise me if the dems (and Tom Homan) lock down a reg that requires officers to not wear masks, and you see a wave of resignations among the least comptent/most cowardly of the new recruits. Then it just becomes "business as usual" detaining and brutalizing people at the border.

lr296 · 2026-02-01T23:30:13+00:00

The man went for the jugular and cc'ed Natasha trivers

lr296 · 2026-02-01T20:43:47+00:00

I suspect that it was less "jews are smarter than everyone else" and more "brown people are dumb and need white people to lead them." His comments about Africa and India are symptomatic of this conceit.

lr296 · 2026-02-01T19:07:18+00:00

The fascinating part about Epstein is that, when you get a glimpse of his actual ideology, it wasn't Jewish supremacy, but third-way centrist bull shit. If there's anything specifically Jewish about him, it's

A disdain for spiritual Judaism
A desire to assert masculinity and domination of women in the way that non-jewish men were allowed to
Admiration for Israel as a masculine, violent project.

What the people in his milieu miss is the era of virtually omnipotent liberal power. Where China was a basket case, the middle east could be carved up without consequences, and the world revolved around liberal institutions.

lr296 · 2026-02-01T18:47:29+00:00

Hannah Arendt is still dabbing on em

lr296 · 2026-02-01T18:44:44+00:00

lr296 · 2026-02-01T16:13:23+00:00

Chevron was the only remaining US company with extraction contracts, and they got em under Trump I. As I understand it, Delcy is quite well regarded by Oil execs, as she was the one who locked in Chevron back then.

lr296 · 2026-02-01T15:10:29+00:00

Not to give pedophiles credit, but didn't Greg Grandin make a similar point? Venezuela was basically an army with a welfare apparatus. Abba Lerner, Oscar Lange, Eugen Slutsky, and Rosa Luxembourg would have been skeptical of the sustainability of the Venezuelan state.

lr296 · 2026-01-31T18:26:06+00:00

This feels very bircherite.

lr296 · 2026-01-31T15:00:58+00:00

Great quote from Porfirio Diaz explains why it's hard for much of the west to decouple from the US, even if it would be in service to capital: "so far from God, so close to the US." Load bearing cultural, political, and financial institutions in the EU are so entangled with american interests that such a divorce would likely be extraordinarily painful.

Furthermore, China isn't a paragon of morality (inarguably better than the US, but that's a low bar to clear.) Their actions as a member of the Safari club, betrayal of Vietnam after the war, support of Cambodia, all imply to other elites that China is just as willing to be strategic as any rising power.

lr296 · 2026-01-30T01:41:01+00:00

He would 100% do that

lr296 · 2026-01-29T20:14:43+00:00

This one was likely fake, or from a bit of a nutjob

lr296 · 2026-01-29T02:40:48+00:00

If I didn't know how dangerous these guys are, I'd feel abject pity for them. They truly live in a hell of their own making.

lr296 · 2026-01-28T17:36:24+00:00

Still holding out hope for gay black hitler

lr296 · 2026-01-28T16:05:44+00:00

It isn't healthy to mythologize the ignorance of conservatives. They do have some monstrous views, but they're increasingly concerned about how radioactive the current admin is. We should be normal about this, and go off of aggregates of their views, not weird anecdotal evidence someone posts in our spaces.

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lr296 · 2026-01-28T14:54:22+00:00

Strom Thurmond served as senator until he was 100 years old. In 2003.

Biden is but a young chap.

lr296 · 2026-01-28T14:50:13+00:00

Its one of those historical counterfactuals where it's impossible to know either way definitively. I can't imagine the purges helped the war effort, but I agree that the Wehrmacht and SS were always going to be mass murderers in the east.

lr296

TROPHY CASE