A cat has absolute emotional honesty [...] Male or female, a cat will show you how it feels about you. People hide their feelings for various reasons, but cats never do.

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A hotdog at the ballgame beats roast beef at the Ritz.

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The logic, insofar as there is any, goes like this: the war has crashed the global oil market so hard that the administration needs the enemy's oil to keep gasoline prices from eating the midterms. They are unsanctioning the people they're bombing because the bombing is working too well at the thing they didn't want it to do. The sanctions were necessary to stop Iran funding the war, but the war made the sanctions too effective, so the sanctions had to be lifted to fund the war effort against the country that no longer needs sanctions because the oil revenues that sanctions were preventing are now required to prevent the economic damage caused by preventing those revenues, which is itself a consequence of the military campaign designed to make the sanctions unnecessary by making Iran the kind of country that doesn't need sanctioning, which it would be, if the sanctions hadn't been lifted to pay for making it that.

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Friday's press gaggle. Barely exaggerated: at 12:03 PM, President Trump told reporters he wanted a ceasefire with Iran. At 12:05 he declared victory. At 12:07 he announced he was sending Marines. At 12:08 he said no boots on the ground. At 12:11 he said he did not want a ceasefire. At 12:16 he declared victory again. At 12:17 he asked for a ceasefire. At 12:23 he told NATO they were cowards. At 12:29 he said Iran was begging for a ceasefire. At 12:31 he said everything was perfect. At 12:36 he said $500 oil was a good thing. At 12:37 he demanded Iran open Hormuz. At 12:39 he said Hormuz was never closed. At 12:41 he said the US was not at war with Iran. At 12:42 he declared victory in Iran.

By 3:43 PM he told CBS he doesn't want a ceasefire. By 5:13 PM - 13 minutes after futures markets closed for the weekend, in a coincidence that should be studied in every securities fraud textbook - he posted on Truth Social that the US is "getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts". The S&P reversed more than 1% in seconds. QQQ had already surged 1.1% in the 80 minutes before the announcement, with call options flowing in at a pace that suggests someone, somewhere, had an itinerary.

I got kind of tired of the omni-invincible Chuck Norris jokes especially after he became a bit of a right wing blowhard, but RIP.

(Did you know he had his own Atari 2600 game?)

No one's normal. It just looks that way from across the street.

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cute FB video (a delightful homebrew looking popup book to misheard lyrics)

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Oh cool, Afroman (of "And Then I Got High Fame") won his lawsuit about his Lemon Pound Cake video (and a few others) mocking the cops who raided his home on pretty trumped up charges.

"We understand many things imperfectly," Harlow conceded. "But however contentious a matter might be, my own counsel would always be to avoid taking a position that justifies barbarity."

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Latifa had always feared that civilization would be brought down by people with thirty-second attention spans, but now she was beginning to suspect that the greater danger came from those who could sit through three-hour vodcasts, robbed of the ordinary human reflexes that should have compelled them to switch to something new instead of marinating in the stream of inanities.

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He needed to spend an hour with a book, a game, or a TV show, just to lay down a clear memory that separated each day from the next, or he ended up back at his desk in the morning feeling like he'd never been away.